The Syrian regime's authorization of an opposition meeting is a "move in the right direction," but President Bashar al-Assad still needs to go further, the United States said Tuesday.

About 160 dissidents, several of whom have spent years in jail as political prisoners, gathered Monday, prompting the U.S. State Department to say it was "pleased to see the opposition has been allowed some breathing space."

Gulf troops sent to back Bahraini security forces in their crackdown on Shiite-led protests are to be "redeployed" but will not withdraw completely, a Saudi official said on Tuesday.

"It is normal to redeploy the Peninsula Shield force but the danger is not over yet and these forces will not return to their bases or entirely withdraw," the official told Agence France Presse.

Anti-regime activists behind street protests in Syria on Tuesday criticized opposition figures who held an unprecedented meeting in Damascus at which they called for a peaceful uprising.

"As a matter of principle, the Coordination Committees of the Syrian Revolution condemn any meeting or congress held under the banner of the regime," they said on their Facebook page, an engine of the revolt.

A visiting Syrian opposition delegation urged Russia on Tuesday to use its diplomatic clout to convince President Bashar al-Assad to give up the use of force against civilians.

"Russia can use its leverage on the Syrian regime to send a clear message that this way of behavior is unacceptable," said rights advocate Radwan Ziadeh, who is head of Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Washington.

Three French aid workers kidnapped in southeastern Yemen a month ago have been "located" and are "alive," the deputy information minister told reporters on Tuesday.

"Security services have managed to locate the French. They are alive," Abdo al-Janadi said.

Israeli troops on Tuesday arrested four Hamas MPs in the northern West Bank, Palestinian security sources and officials from the Islamist group said.

Three of them were arrested in the early hours in the northern city of Nablus, while a fourth was picked up in Salfit, a town some 15 kilometers further south, they said.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh is to speak on television within days to reassure Yemenis on his health, three weeks after being hospitalized in Riyadh with bomb blast wounds, a senior official said on Tuesday.

A United Nations mission, meanwhile, started a 10-day visit to examine the human rights situation in Yemen after five months of street protests against Saleh and deadly clashes with security forces.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards fired 14 missiles in an exercise Tuesday, one of them a medium-range weapon capable of striking Israel or U.S. targets in the Gulf, state media said.

The Guards' aerospace commander, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, insisted Iran's missile program posed no threat to European nations but was merely intended to provide defense against Israel and U.S. forces in the Gulf.

An Emirati court has sentenced six people to between three and five years in jail for trying to smuggle weapons from Turkey to Yemen in an operation foiled by Dubai police, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

"Six men were sentenced to prison for their roles in trying to ship 16,000 pistols through Dubai into Yemen," said The National.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday that Israel's diplomatic and political efforts to curb the size of a new Gaza-bound aid flotilla had been successful.

Speaking to public radio by telephone from Zagreb where he is on a visit, Lieberman said it was thanks to Israeli efforts that there were only 10 ships planning to set sail from Greece later this week.