Egypt's prosecution is probing complaints of "threatening public security" against popular satirist Bassem Youssef, who is already on bail facing charges of insulting the president and offending Islam.

Judicial sources and Youssef said the public prosecutor ordered the probe on Monday following a complaint by a lawyer. The state security prosecution, which handles national security cases, will conduct the investigation.

For millions of Syrians displaced by fighting, every day is a struggle to survive, and for those in Kherbet al-Khaldiye, that means eating and drinking whatever they can forage.

"We eat herbs and collect stagnant rainwater to drink and wash in," says 24-year-old Hisham, his head covered in a red and white chequered keffiyeh scarf.

Former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been accused of meddling in his country's fragile political transition, was in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for treatment, a Yemeni diplomat said.

Saleh arrived for medical tests and treatment in the Saudi capital on Monday, his party, General People's Congress (GPC), said. He spent time recovering in a Riyadh hospital in June 2011 after an attack on his compound left him seriously wounded.

Gunmen killed two Iraqi engineers, wounded a third and kidnapped another when they attacked a camp near a gas field run by a South Korean firm in Iraq's western desert, officials said on Tuesday.

The attack on the camp, for workers contracted by KOGAS to work on the Akkaz field, occurred at around 10:00 pm (19:00 GMT) on Monday, according to Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed al-Khafaji, the chief of police in the town of Qaim on the Iraq-Syria border.

Fighting between Syria's rebels and loyalist troops raged in two Damascus neighborhoods on Tuesday while shelling of a village near the capital left four members of a family dead, a watchdog said.

"Fierce battles broke out in the Barzeh district of northern Damascus. Shelling in the area wounded five people and caused material damage," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a broad network of activists, doctors and lawyers for its reporting.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas blamed the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday for the death of a prisoner suffering from terminal cancer.

"The Palestinian presidency holds the government of Netanyahu responsible for the martyrdom of prisoner Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh today in the prisons of the Israeli occupation," Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.

Hamas re-elected its veteran leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo on Monday, an official of the Palestinian Islamist movement said.

"The leaders of Hamas chose Meshaal," the high-ranking official told Agence France Presse via telephone from the Egyptian capital, requesting anonymity.

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad was hospitalized on Monday with stomach pains, but his life was not in any danger, medics in Ramallah said.

Fayyad "suffered from a mild infection of the stomach and is being treated with antibiotics," a doctor at the hospital in the West Bank city told Agence France Presse.

Morocco's military trial and imprisonment of 25 Sahrawis, nine of them for life, violated international law, Human Rights Watch charged on Monday, calling on Rabat to either free or retry the defendants in a civilian court.

The New York-based rights watchdog said the military tribunal rejected defense demands to investigate the allegations by the accused that police had tortured them and forced them to sign statements they had not read.

The United States on Monday voiced concern over freedom of expression in Egypt following the arrest of a comedian for allegedly insulting President Mohamed Morsi and Islam.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the detention and release of television satirist Bassem Youssef was evidence of a "disturbing trend" of mounting restrictions on freedom of expression.