Hundreds of Iraqi expatriates protested against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki outside the Iraqi embassy in Sanaa on Wednesday, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

"Maliki leave, the Iraqi people don't want you," chanted the protesters, who marched from Sanaa's northern Sittin Avenue to the embassy carrying Iraqi flags.

Iraq has freed around 400 prisoners since Sunni Arabs began anti-government demonstrations last month, and will press on with more releases on a daily basis, a top minister said on Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said that a committee formed in the wake of the protests would accelerate the process of reviewing prisoners' cases and would look to immediately release those who had been proven innocent.

Opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi's son has been handed a suspended six-month prison sentence for anti-regime conduct, Iran's Fars news agency reported on Wednesday quoting an unnamed source.

Iran's "revolutionary court has sentenced Mohammad Hossein Karroubi to a six-month jail term... for disturbing public opinion against the Islamic regime through giving interviews to foreign media," Fars quoted the source as saying.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advanced a "record" number of settlements during its nearly four years in office, a report by the Peace Now watchdog said on Wednesday.

The government's actions "disclose a clear intention to use settlements to systematically undermine and render impossible a realistic, viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," said the Israeli NGO's report.

Turkish jets struck more than 50 Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq where members of the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are based, military sources said Wednesday.

"Sixteen F-16 fighter jets took off from their base in Diyarbakir in the southeast at around 20:00 GMT Tuesday and bombed the (rebel) targets in Qandil mountain in northern Iraq, 90 kilometers from the border," military sources said.

Saudi Arabia beheaded a Pakistani man in the eastern Khubar province on Wednesday after he was convicted of drug trafficking, the interior ministry announced.

Arshad Mohammed was arrested for smuggling heroin and hashish into the kingdom, the ministry was quoted as saying by the official SPA news agency.

At least 25 people were killed on Wednesday when a 12-story building collapsed in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, the health ministry said.

Another 12 people were injured, deputy health minister Mohammed al-Sharkawi told AFP.

Israeli MPs on Wednesday accused U.S. President Barack Obama of meddling in Israel's upcoming elections over an opinion piece purporting to outline his view of Benjamin Netanyahu's "self-defeating" policies.

The piece, which was published by the prominent Bloomberg columnist Jeffery Goldberg, made headlines across the Israeli press and sparked angry reactions from MPs from the Israeli prime minister's ruling rightwing Likud party.

The death toll from twin blasts that tore through the campus of Aleppo university has risen to 87, a watchdog said on Wednesday, making the attack one of the bloodiest in Syria's 22-month conflict.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blasts that rocked the university in Syria's northern commercial capital as students were sitting for their exams on Tuesday, but the government and rebels have blamed each other.

Attacks in Baghdad and north Iraq killed 42 people on Wednesday as hundreds attended the funeral of a Sunni MP who died in a suicide attack a day earlier, as a political crisis grips the country.

The violence, which struck mostly in disputed territory in the north and which officials also said wounded at least 245 people, was the deadliest this year.