Israel may be openly hoping that Republican challenger Mitt Romney will end up stealing the presidency from Barack Obama, but for the Palestinians it makes little difference who takes over the White House.

With the U.S. presidential race drawing to a close, Israelis have come out strongly in favor of the Republican nominee who they believe is likely to be a better friend to the Jewish state than President Obama.

Munzir is still a teenager but he's already a veteran of the Syrian war. He fought in his hometown, driving out regime soldiers, and is now trying to do the same in Aleppo.

Except that winning Aazaz only took a couple of weeks.

Amnesty International called on Iran on Friday to probe allegations of abuses against female prisoners by their guards, saying nine women inmates were on hunger strike in response to the mistreatment.

The women, held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, include activists and journalists who say they were subjected to humiliating and degrading body searches by female guards who also confiscated their personal belongings, Amnesty said.

Libyan ex-rebel fighters protesting against a new government line-up loosened a day-old siege of the national assembly building on Friday, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Traffic was flowing freely again on the road leading to the assembly and the adjacent Rixos hotel, with police cars deployed at the entrances and at nearby junctions.

A top aide to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Friday he is apprehensive about the Islamic movement that brought Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to power and sees no dialogue forthcoming between Morsi and Israeli leaders.

"If I am apprehensive about anything, it's the Muslim Brotherhood because the Muslim Brotherhood is an ideological movement and they are undergoing a revival," Amos Gilad, the head of the defense ministry policy department said in remarks broadcast by Israeli public radio.

A Salafist imam has declared war on Tunisia's Islamist ruling party during a television talk show, with the interior minister countering that such talk was responsible for blood being shed.

"I am going to make war on these people because the interior minister and the leaders of Ennahda have chosen the United States as their god -- it is the Americans who are writing the laws and the new constitution," Nasreddine Aloui said in a Thursday night appearance by video link on Ettounsiya television.

A video showing what appears to be rebels executing Syrian soldiers most probably shows "war crimes" that could be used as evidence to bring the perpetrators to justice, the U.N. human rights body said Friday.

"It is very likely that this was a war crime, another one," Rupert Colville, spokesman for U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, told reporters in Geneva.

An electoral pact between the parties of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foreign minister, designed to strengthen them both in January's general election, could have the opposite effect, according to polls published on Friday.

A survey by Smith Research for the Jerusalem Post indicated that if the election were held now, the rightwing alliance of Netanyahu's Likud and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu parties would win a combined total of 37 seats in the 120-member parliament, compared with 42 at present.

A Palestinian was seriously wounded by cross-border fire from an Israeli tank in the central Gaza Strip on Friday, a spokesman for the Hamas-run health ministry said.

He did not give the man's name or the exact circumstances but said he was 22 years old and close to the border fence with Israel, east of Bureij refugee camp, when he was hit.

Syrian main exiled opposition group on Friday accused Washington of undermining the country's revolution by seeking to overhaul how regime opponents are organized.

Two days ahead of key opposition talks due in Qatar, the Syrian National Council lashed out at U.S. criticism of the group for not being fully representative of Syria's diverse dissident groups.