Four Filipino United Nations peacekeepers abducted last week by armed men while patrolling in the demilitarized area between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights have been released, officials said Sunday.

U.N. officials and the Philippine army both said that the four are in good health.

The rebels from the Yarmouk Martyrs' Brigade had said they were holding the soldiers for their own safety after clashes with Syrian government forces had put them in danger, Reuters reported.

They were seized on Tuesday as they patrolled close to an area where the same rebel group held 21 Filipino observers for three days in March.

A rebel spokesman said the four were handed over on Sunday morning at a border checkpoint called Beit Ara, in an area where the Jordanian and Israeli borders join with the Golan Heights.

"They have been handed over in a spot in the Yarmouk Valley," Abu Iyas al-Horani told Reuters.

Philippine Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario confirmed to Reuters in Manila that the four had been released.

Brigadier General Domingo Tutaan, a spokesman for the Philippine armed forces, said the four had already been taken back to their battalion in the U.N. peacekeeping force on the Golan Heights.

The Philippines said it aimed to pull out 342 soldiers on peacekeeping duties in Golan after the abduction.

Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East War and later annexed them, a move not recognized internationally.

Meanwhile, at least 82,000 people have been killed and 12,500 others are missing after two years of civil war in Syria, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.

Most of the dead were killed by troops and militia loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and most of the missing are believed to have been detained by the government's secret police and other loyalists, the monitoring group said.

"The vast majority of civilian victims were killed by the regime. Killings in unofficial jails are commonplace, and the conditions under which prisoners are held are horrific," said Rami Abdulrahman, the Observatory's president.

The Observatory, established by Abdulrahman in Britain seven years ago, said 4,788 children were among the 34,473 civilians killed. Another 12,916 anti-Assad fighters were killed, along with 1,924 army deserters, it said.

On the loyalist side, 16,729 troops and 12,000 militiamen and informers have been killed. The report said the fate of around 2,500 loyalist troops believed to be held by rebels is unknown.

Reuters contributed to this report

BEIRUT - Rebels holding 21 U.N. peacekeepers near the Golan Heights in southern Syria say they will not harm them but insist government forces must pull back from the region before they are freed, an activist said on Thursday.

Rami Abdelrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights quoted a spokesman for the "Martyrs of Yarmouk" rebel brigade as saying the convoy of Philippine peacekeepers were being held as "guests" in the village of Jamla, about one mile from a ceasefire line with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

"He said they will not be harmed. But the rebels want the Syrian army and tanks to pull back from the area," Abdelrahman said after speaking to the rebel spokesman on Thursday morning.

The capture of the U.N. peacekeepers close to Israeli-held territory was another sign that Syria's conflict, nearing its second anniversary, could spill over to neighboring countries.

Israel has said it will not "stand idle" if violence spreads to the Golan, which it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents killed 48 Syrian troops inside Iraq on Monday and cross-border artillery fired from Syria has killed people in Lebanon and Turkey in recent months.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino said the peacekeepers were being well treated and that the United Nations was in touch with the rebels to ensure their safety. "By tomorrow they expect all of these 21 to be released," he said, adding their release might occur as early as Thursday.

Aquino said both sides in the Syrian conflict considered the United Nations a "benign presence" in the country - a view not shared by many Syrian rebels, who hold the organisation at least partly responsible for a lack of international support.

In a video released to announce the capture of the U.N. convoy on Wednesday, a member of the Yarmouk Martyrs' Brigade accused the peacekeepers of collaborating with Assad's forces to try to push them out of village of Jamla which the rebels seized on Sunday after heavy fighting.

Peacekeepers of the U.N. Disengagement Force (UNDOF) mission have been monitoring a ceasefire line between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, for nearly four decades. 

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