Attacks north of Baghdad, including a third suicide blast in as many days, killed at least eight people Tuesday, officials said, amid a spike in violence that has left almost 70 people dead in all.

The latest bloodshed, in which over 150 people have been wounded, has raised tensions as Iraq grapples with a political crisis and demonstrators in mostly Sunni areas of the country call for the resignation of the Shiite premier.

Fierce battles erupted Tuesday in the city of Aleppo, a northern Syria battleground for the past six months, as rebels fought troops near an army barracks and tanks shelled the area, a watchdog said.

In the countryside surrounding Aleppo, once Syria's thriving commercial capital but now ravaged by war, troops also shelled the rebel-held towns of al-Bab and Sfeira, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syrian opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib's offer of talks with regime officials is significant but "two years late", the pro-regime daily al-Watan said on Tuesday.

"Despite their importance, the statements of Sheikh Moaz al-Khatib are two years late. During that time, our finest young men have died, suffered wounds or been exiled, while we have lost our electricity and fuel infrastructure, alongside several military positions," al-Watan said in a long editorial.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discussed the Syrian conflict with Egyptian counterpart Mohamed Morsi on Tuesday, in the first visit by an Iranian leader to Egypt in decades amid thawing relations.

Morsi, an Islamist who fiercely opposes Ahmadinejad's Syrian regime allies, met the Iranian leader in Cairo airport after his arrival for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation summit, footage on state television showed.

Iranian police have arrested former Tehran prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, an ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who termed the arrest a "very ugly action."

Mortazavi, Tehran's notorious former prosecutor, was suspended in August 2010 along with two other judges over the death in prison of three anti-government protesters in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election.

Some 200 Arabs demonstrated outside a prison in the central Israeli town of Ramle on Monday, demanding the release of hunger-striking Palestinian inmates.

The protesters, from Israel and Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem who included women and children, demanded the prisoners' release from detention without trial, an Agence France Presse journalist at the scene reported.

The bishop of the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday urged the international community to pay greater attention to the fate of Syria's Christian minority, saying they were being terrorized by a spate of kidnappings for money.

"Aleppo has been living in terror and anguish for seven months," Antoine Audo of the Chaldean Church, who also heads the Syrian branch of the Catholic charity Caritas, said in an interview with Agence France Presse.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Monday that Tehran would continue talks with the Syrian opposition following a preliminary meeting at the weekend.

"We had 45 (minutes) to an hour discussion which was very fruitful... and we committed ourselves to continue this discussion," Salehi told a foreign-policy think tank in Berlin after meeting Syrian opposition leader Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib at a security conference in the southern German city of Munich.

The United Nations said Monday it has started delivering chemicals to treat water consumed by more than 10 million people in Syria, nearly half of the strife-torn country's population.

The first four trucks carrying 80 tons of such chemicals including sodium and chlorine crossed through the Jordanian border into Syria on Sunday heading for war-torn regions of Homs, Aleppo, Hama and Idlib, the UNICEF said.

Two years after the start of the uprising that ousted Moammar Gadhafi, Libya's new rulers are under attack for lack of reforms and face protests on February 15 being touted by some as a "second revolution".

Faced with growing rumblings in the street, the authorities have put security forces on high alert ahead of the protests as well as celebrations two days later marking the second anniversary of the "February 17 Revolution" that led to Gadhafi's ouster and being killed in October 2011.