A swap took place overnight between Hizbullah and rebel fighters in Syria's al-Zabadani region, revealed LBCI television on Tuesday.

It said that the exchange saw the release of the corpses of a Hizbullah member and a Syrian soldier.

The suffering in the Syrian town of Madaya is the worst seen in the country's civil war, the United Nations said Tuesday, a day after delivering aid to the area besieged for months.

"There is no comparison in what we saw in Madaya," the U.N. refugee agency's chief in Damascus, Sajjad Malik, told journalists in Geneva, when asked to compare the devastation in the town to other areas in Syria.

A top representative of Syrian opposition groups, former prime minister Riad Hijab, said Monday there would be no peace talks while "foreign forces" were bombing the country.

Hijab was chosen in December as general coordinator of several opposition groups which are preparing for possible talks with the government in Damascus.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius Monday called on the Syrian regime to end the siege of rebel-held Madaya and said a halt to air strikes by the regime and its Russian ally was an "absolute necessity."

Speaking two weeks ahead of possible U.N.-brokered peace talks, Fabius said it was an "absolute necessity for Syria and Russia to stop their military operations against civilian populations, and in particular that the ordeal facing Madaya and all the besieged Syrian villages come to an end."

The first trucks carrying desperately needed aid entered the besieged Syrian town of Madaya on Monday, where more than two dozen people are reported to have starved to death.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent said two trucks loaded with food and blankets entered the rebel-held town late afternoon, at around the same time a military source said three others entered each of the government-controlled towns of Fuaa and Kafraya.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Saturday condemned an attack on Syrian refugees who were pepper-sprayed during a welcome event in Vancouver, an incident police are treating as a hate crime.

The group of newly arrived Syrians, which included children, was sprayed by an unknown bicyclist as they gathered outdoors Friday for a welcome function at the Muslim Association of Canada Center, Vancouver police said.

An Islamic State jihadist killed his mother in a public square in the Syrian city of Raqa who begged him to leave the organization, a monitor said Friday.

Ali Saqr, 20, had reported his mother, Lina, to IS authorities in Raqa "because she tried to persuade him to leave IS and flee the city," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syria's government gave permission Thursday for U.N. aid deliveries to three besieged towns, including Madaya near Damascus where people are reportedly starving to death, the U.N. said.

"The U.N. welcomes today's approval from the Government of Syria to access Madaya, Fuaa and Kafraya and is preparing to deliver humanitarian assistance in the coming days," a U.N. statement said.

The head of Russia's Orthodox Church justified the Kremlin's bombing campaign in Syria, calling it a "defensive war" in an interview released Thursday as the country marked Orthodox Christmas.

Patriarch Kirill said Moscow's military strikes were necessary to protect Russia from "terrorism".

It's an occasional but regular sighting in Istanbul. Out of the mist on the Bosphorus that divides Europe and Asia looms the hulk of a Russian warship purposefully making its way to the Mediterranean.

Most likely the ship is part of Moscow's so-called "Syria Express", a key supply line for naval deliveries from its Black Sea ports to military operations backing the regime of President Bashar Assad in Syria.