A Palestinian minister on Tuesday accused "terrorists" fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad of blocking aid access to the Yarmuk refugee camp in southern Damascus.

Rebels control swathes of Yarmuk, but for months government forces have imposed a suffocating siege on the camp, where some 20,000 Palestinians live despite terrible shortages.

Senator Rand Paul will introduce legislation Tuesday to finally bring Washington's Iraq war authorization to an end, his office said, and the White House backs the Republican's efforts in principle.

U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq more than two years ago and President Barack Obama declared the war over, yet a loophole in the law green-lighting the March 2003 invasion of Iraq allows for future U.S. presidents to send troops back to the turbulent country.

The White House reacted angrily Tuesday after Israel's defense minister attacked what he called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's "obsession" with Middle East peace.

President Barack Obama's spokesman Jay Carney said Moshe Yaalon's remarks "if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate, especially in the light of everything Secretary Kerry is doing to support Israel's security needs."

Palestinian diplomats have apologized for hiding illegal weapons at the Prague embassy where a blast killed the ambassador on New Year's Day, the Czech foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

"A high-ranking Palestinian foreign ministry official... issued an official apology from the Palestinian side for the illegal presence of weapons on the premises of the Palestinian embassy," the ministry said in a statement.

Israeli police pulled over the convoy of Palestinian premier Rami Hamdallah on Tuesday for "reckless driving" in a move the Ramallah government blasted as harassment, saying he was deliberately targeted.

"An Israeli military vehicle accompanied by police and settlers stopped Rami Hamdallah's convoy today between Ramallah and Nablus," government spokesman Ihab Bseiso told reporters in Ramallah, saying the convoy was held up for about an hour.

Gun and bomb attacks in Baghdad Tuesday killed 10 people, including a senior judge, in part of a protracted surge in bloodshed ahead of April parliamentary elections.

The bloodshed came just a day after attacks in and around the capital killed 30, with the spike in unrest and a deadly weeks-long standoff in Anbar province sparking fears Iraq is slipping back into the brutal sectarian war that killed tens of thousands in 2006 and 2007.

Young protesters have clashed with Moroccan security forces in Laayoune, the main city of Western Sahara, torching a police vehicle, a rights activist in the disputed territory said on Tuesday.

The protesters hurled petrol bombs at the security forces who threw rocks in response and chased them, said Hamoud Iguilid from the Moroccan Association of Human Rights.

Sunni fighters including al-Qaida-linked militants have overrun several more areas of Ramadi, one of two Iraqi cities near Baghdad at the center of a weeks-long crisis, police said on Tuesday.

Iraqi forces and allied tribes had in the past few days been retaking areas of the Anbar provincial capital from the militants and anti-government tribal fighters, but the latest setback could prolong the standoff still further.

Egyptians queued outside polling stations on Tuesday to vote on a new constitution many said they had not read but would approve anyway in support of the army's ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

The referendum has been billed by authorities as the first in a series of polls that will restore elected government by the end of the year.

At least eight Syrian rebels were killed overnight when jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant detonated a car bomb in Syria's Idlib province, an NGO said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the car bomb targeted a rebel checkpoint near Ram Hamdan, northeast of Idlib city.