Iraq's Agriculture Minister Ezzedine al-Dawleh resigned on Friday over the killing of a protester by security forces, an Iraqi deputy premier told Agence France Presse.

"The minister of agriculture resigned today," Saleh al-Mutlak, member of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc said.

A Syrian official working in the office of the governor of Damascus was killed on Friday by a bomb planted in his car, an official television channel reported, blaming the attack on "terrorists".

"Terrorists planted an explosive device in Asaad Mohanna's car," said al-Ikhbariya television, using the regime's term to refer to rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's forces.

The Croatian capital has served for months as a transit point for Saudi-financed weapons for Syrian rebels, a local newspaper said on Friday, but the report was swiftly denied by the government.

Some 75 civilian transport planes carrying weapons for the rebels battling the regime of President Bashar Assad took off from Zagreb airport between last November and February, the influential Jutarnji List reported citing unnamed diplomatic sources.

The Hamas prime minister charged on Friday that an upcoming regional visit by U.S. President Barack Obama was a "trap" aimed at undermining Palestinian reconciliation.

"We are convinced that Obama's visit will not produce the necessary breakthrough for our people," Ismail Haniya said at a sermon during weekly Muslim prayers in the Gaza Strip's al-Omari mosque.

EU foreign ministers will hold talks Monday with the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, days after the bloc renewed wide-ranging sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime.

Brahimi will have "an exchange of views" on the two-year conflict in Syria with the 27 EU foreign ministers at their regular monthly meeting, a European Union official said Friday.

U.N. efforts to secure the release of 21 peacekeepers abducted in the Golan dragged on into a third day Friday as Manila said rebels holding the Filipinos were sticking to their demand Syrian troops leave the area.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous was to brief the Security Council on the abduction later Friday as concern mounted about its implications for the future of the four-decade-old U.N. force patrolling the sensitive armistice line between Israel and Syria.

Palestinians enraged by reports that an Israeli policeman mishandled a Quran battled riot officers at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound with stones and petrol bombs on Friday, police and witnesses said.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that about 100 protesters, many of them masked, attacked police, who fired stun grenades in response.

A top Syrian regime official thanked the BRICS group of emerging powers on Friday for its support, which she said had prevented Western military intervention and the "destruction" of the country.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a cabinet-level adviser to Syrian President Bashar Assad, told reporters in New Delhi that Damascus was grateful to the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The World Food Program aims to feed 2.5 million Syrians next month, up from 1.7 million today, as more Syrians are displaced by their country's civil war and the economy is disintegrating, a spokeswoman said Friday.

Since the start of the Syria conflict two years ago, nearly 4 million of Syria's 22 million people have been driven from their homes by the fighting, according to U.N. estimates. This includes those who fled to neighboring countries and some 2 million who sought shelter inside Syria.

Israel helped eight U.N. peacekeepers redeploy from an isolated post in the part of the Golan ceasefire zone where 21 of their comrades are being held hostage by Syrian rebels, the military said on Friday.

The troops -- all Filipinos, like the hostages -- left their positions overnight and moved through Israeli-held territory to join up with comrades in the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force further north along the armistice line, an army spokeswoman said.