The meeting will take place Saturday in Cairo. The League's deputy secretary-general, Ahmed bin Heli, said the meeting will look into the first report by the head of the monitoring mission, which began Dec. 27.

Another official told The Associated Press that the ministerial meeting will discuss whether to pull out the monitors because of the ongoing violence in Syria.

The Saturday meeting will not make a final decision, but will send its recommendations to another, high-level ministerial meeting. No date was set for that meeting.

There are about 100 Arab League monitors in Syria, dispatched to verify the regime's compliance with an Arab League plan to stop its crackdown on a 9-month-old uprising.

But activists say hundreds have been slain in the week since the observers started work.

Opposition groups have been deeply critical of the mission, saying it is simply giving President Bashar Assad cover for his crackdown.

The Local Coordinating Committees, an umbrella group of activists, says the observer mission is witnessing mainly regime-staged events, and they move about the country only with the full knowledge of the government.

The commander of Syrian armed rebels said on Tuesday he was dissatisfied with the monitors' progress in halting a military crackdown on protests and threatened to wait only a few days before escalating operations with a new style of attack.

"If we feel they (the monitors) are still not serious in a few days, or at most within a week, we will take a decision which will surprise the regime and the whole world," the head of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Colonel Riad Al-Asaad, told Reuters.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy demanded Bashar step down for overseeing "disgusting" massacres against his own people, as the Arab monitors’ mission came in for more flak on Tuesday.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday that he was "skeptical" about the progress of the Arab League’s operation.

"The conditions under which this observer mission is operating should be clarified," Juppe said, questioning whether the observers really had free access to information.