United Nations international staff have returned to Sudan's South Kordofan for the first time in months, the U.N. said on Saturday, as global concern mounts over food shortages in the war-torn state.

"Today, FAO and OCHA flew back there by helicopter and they landed safely" in the state capital of Kadugli, Damian Rance, a public information officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP.

Dozens of Iraqis in Baghdad's Tahrir Square rallied on Saturday to demand reforms, on the first anniversary of demonstrations in which 16 people were killed in clashes with security forces.

The number of protesters was a far cry from the turn-out a year ago, when thousands took to the streets of Baghdad and at least 16 other cities to decry official corruption, poor basic services and high unemployment.

About 2,000 mourners, some firing automatic rifles into the air, marched on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Saturday with the body of a Palestinian shot dead by Israeli troops.

Tareq Arumi, 23, was killed in one of a string of clashes on Friday between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters angry over violence in the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Tunisia's president on Saturday as she continued a tour of the region following a global meeting on Syria that ratcheted up pressure on Bashar Assad.

At the start of talks with President Moncef Marzouki, Clinton said the "Friends of Syria" meeting of more than 60 foreign ministers in Tunisia had been a success.

Chinese state media on Saturday accused the U.S. and Europe of "harboring hegemonistic ambitions" in Syria, after Western and Arab nations ratcheted up pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad at a meeting in Tunisia.

In a commentary Beijing's official Xinhua news agency said that "most of the Arab countries have begun to realize that the United States and Europe are hiding a dagger behind a smile".

Regime forces killed 41 civilians in Syria on Saturday, while 16 soldiers died in explosions and clashes with rebels, a monitoring group said.

Among the civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 19 were killed in the flashpoint city of Homs, as a rebel stronghold there is shelled for the 22nd straight day.

Longtime Yemeni vice president Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi took the oath of office as president on Saturday ahead of formal handover of power by veteran strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Hadi pledged to "preserve the country's unity, independence and territorial integrity" in a swearing-in ceremony in parliament broadcast live by state television.

Iraq will not invite the Syrian government or opposition to an Arab summit to be held in Baghdad in late March, Iraq's foreign minister said in an interview broadcast on Friday.

"Syria is not invited and we will not send an invitation to it" to attend the summit, Hoshyar Zebari said in an interview with Iraqiya television.

A Palestinian wounded by Israeli army gunfire on the outskirts of Jerusalem died in hospital on Friday night after a day of clashes in and around the holy city, medics said.

Ramallah hospital emergency room staff said that Tareq Arumi, 23, was hit in a clash with troops during the afternoon in protests in the West Bank neighborhood of al-Ram, adjacent to Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

The sole candidate in Yemen's presidential election on Tuesday, Vice President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi, received 99.8 percent of the valid votes cast, the country's electoral commission announced on Friday.

According to the final results, 6,635,192 voters from an eligible electorate of 10,243,364 cast their ballots -- a turnout of 66 percent -- the commission said.