Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appointed former agriculture minister Adel Safar the new premier on Sunday and asked him to form a government as thousands joined the funeral procession for protesters killed in Douma.

Cell phone and internet networks failed for several hours on Sunday "due to an overload", according to a customer representative, a day after authorities carried out a wave of arrests in protest cities.

Militant groups in the Gaza Strip vowed again Sunday to avenge the killing of three of their own, saying Israel would be punished for the strike.

"The occupation's crimes will not go unpunished and it will bear all consequences," said a joint statement from the military wings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other armed Palestinian factions.

Israel on Sunday demanded the retraction of a United Nations report deeply critical of its deadly 2008-2009 offensive on the Gaza Strip after the main author expressed regret over the conclusions.

South African judge Richard Goldstone had faced down enormous criticism in Israel at the time over the report which accused both Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza of potential war crimes during the 22-day conflict.

A coalition air raid late on Friday killed 13 people, four of them civilians, some 15 kilometers (10 miles) east of the battleground Libyan oil town of Brega, a rebel civilian official told Agence France Presse.

The four civilians comprised an ambulance driver and three medical students from the second city of Benghazi, who were part of a rebel convoy of five or six vehicles, said Issa Khamis, liaison officer for the rebels' transitional government in the town of Ajdabiya, east of Brega.

Syrian security forces made dawn arrests on Saturday as mourners prepared to bury the first of at least nine people killed in anti-government protests on the Muslim day of rest, rights activists said.

The arrests came in the tribal region around the town of Daraa, some 100 kilometers south of the capital, which has been one of the main centers of more than two weeks of demonstrations.

Saudi Arabia has urged Iran to mind its own business after a parliamentary panel in Tehran warned that Riyadh was "playing with fire" by deploying troops in Bahrain.

"Iran's statement deliberately ignores Iran's interference in the region's affairs and its violation of the independence and sovereignty of the region," a government official said late on Friday, quoted by state news agency SPA.

Hamas on Saturday warned Israel of "consequences" after its latest air strike on Gaza killed three members of the radical Islamist group's armed wing.

Medical staff and witnesses said earlier one Palestinian was also wounded in the air strike in the southern Gaza Strip.

Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg have been hit with a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion in damages over a page on the social network which called for a "Third Intifada" against Israel.

Facebook this week shut down the "Third Intifada" page, which had almost 500,000 fans, but the lawsuit filed in a court here claims that the social network showed "negligence" by not quickly responding to appeals to remove the page.

Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters on Friday north of Damascus and in the south of the country, killing at least nine people, a witness and a human rights activist said, as thousands of Syrians staged demonstrations after Friday prayers.

At least eight protesters fell in Douma, 15 kilometers north of the Syrian capital when police opened fire after protesters emerging from a mosque pelted them with stones, the witness told Agence France Presse by telephone.

Huge rival protests split the Yemeni capital as security forces staged an unprecedented deployment in another Friday showdown on the streets between supporters and opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Amid fears of an outbreak of violence, tens of thousands of pro-regime supporters waving flags and banners gathered in squares around Sanaa, passing through checkpoints set up by security forces kitted with guns and batons.