Bahrain police on Friday fired tear gas to disperse Shiite protesters who took to the streets of the capital Manama chanting anti-regime slogans, witnesses said.

The demonstration coincided with the final football game in the Gulf Cup of Nations being hosted in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.

Israeli security forces seriously wounded a Palestinian youth during clashes near Bethlehem on Friday, Palestinian medical officials said.

The 15-year-old was hit in the face by a bullet that bounced off the ground during clashes in Aida, a West Bank refugee camp north of Bethlehem, and was taken to hospital in Beit Jala, medical officials said.

Some 2,000 protesters including Islamists, youths and leftists held a sit-in the Jordanian capital on Friday, rejecting as "cosmetic" a general election due to be staged next week.

"We reject cosmetic elections and schemes against our demands for reform," read a banner carried by the demonstrators in Jabal Hussein, close to central Amman.

Thousands rallied in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq on Friday, calling for the ouster of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the latest of ongoing protests that have deepened a political crisis.

Demonstrators in Baghdad and other cities also demanded the reform of anti-terror laws they say are targeted at the Sunni community, as well as the release of prisoners they claim are being wrongfully held.

A Belgian-born French journalist, Yves Debay, has died from sniper fire in north Syria's Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

"He was killed on one of Aleppo's fronts" on Thursday, said the Aleppo Media Center, adding that he was "shot by a regime sniper."

Rebels bogged down in Syria's former commercial hub of Aleppo are waging an assault on regime forces defending its international airport, seeing it as the key to seizing the whole city.

"If the airport falls, all of Aleppo will fall," said Colonel Abu Kosai, one of the rebel commanders of the multi-pronged operation against the regime base on the airport's periphery.

Fierce clashes raged on Friday in the majority Kurdish northern Syrian city of Ras al-Ain on the Turkish border, a day after a sniper killed a French journalist in embattled Aleppo.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed Yves Debay's death on Friday, after Aleppo-based activists accused regime troops of the shooting, and distributed photographs of his body and press card.

The toll from a spate of attacks across Iraq on Thursday rose to 29 dead and 120 wounded, officials said, amid weeks of anti-government protests and a political crisis engulfing the country.

The attacks marked the third consecutive day of violence that claimed 88 lives overall, including that of a Sunni Iraqi MP killed by a suicide bomber and 33 others who died in twin car bombs in an ethnically mixed northern city.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Friday that there would be no dismantlement of any Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank if he wins a general election next week.

Asked in an interview with the Maariv newspaper: "Can you promise that during the next four years, no settlement will be dismantled?" Netanyahu answered: "Yes."

FBI director Robert Mueller traveled to Libya, his office said Thursday, as U.S. investigators continue their probe there into last year's deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission.

"The director was in Libya to discuss cooperation on several issues," said an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity, without addressing whether Mueller, America's top cop, was investigating the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi.