At least two Iranian Kurdish rebels and one member of Tehran's elite Revolutionary Guards were killed during clashes along the Islamic Republic's border with Iraq, the two sides said on Sunday.

The fighting, which also saw four rebel fighters wounded, comes less than a week after the Islamic Republic warned that it reserved the right to attack the bases of the PJAK, or the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, in neighboring Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

The Syrian army on Sunday set its sights on the town of Zabadani near the Lebanon border as it pressed ahead in its campaign to overcome an anti-regime revolt, a human rights activist said.

In the east, on the frontier with Iraq, security forces were also reported to be preparing to intervene in al-Bukamal after one man was reported killed there on Saturday.

An Iraqi pediatrician was released by militants after his family paid a half-million dollar ransom, a senior police officer in the ethnically divided northern city of Kirkuk said on Sunday.

Safi Harzan, 48, was freed on Saturday evening in a village south of the city after spending three weeks in captivity, according to the officer, who did not want to be named.

Seven people were wounded in Gaza on Sunday by what Palestinian medical sources said was an Israeli air strike, but Israel denied it had carried out any such raid.

Adham Abu Selmiya, spokesman for the Hamas-run medical services in the Gaza Strip, said four children and three adults suffered moderate injuries in air strikes in the northern Beit Hanun area of the Gaza Strip.

Israel's defense establishment wants to see ties with Turkey repaired, even supporting an apology to Ankara for a bloody 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, Israel's Haaretz daily reported Sunday.

Relations between the former allies have been in tatters since the military operation, in which nine Turkish activists were killed when Israeli commandos raided a flotilla trying to breach a blockade on the Gaza Strip.

Embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Saturday told those calling on him to go that he would never leave the land of his ancestors and those who have given their lives for him.

"They are asking me to leave. That's a laugh. I will never leave the land of my ancestors or the people who have sacrificed themselves for me," he said in a loudspeaker address to thousands of people in Zawiyah, some 50 kilometers west of Tripoli.

Hundreds of Syrian dissidents debated strategies to oust Bashar Assad's regime Saturday in Istanbul as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a halt to the "brutal" repression of protests.

A simultaneous gathering scheduled to take place in Damascus was cancelled after at least 28 civilians were killed, including 16 in the capital, in demonstrations on Friday, activists said.

Ex-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's murder trial will most likely be held in the Red Sea resort where he is hospitalized, which is bound to anger activists demanding his transfer to Cairo, officials said on Saturday.

The 83-year-old former strongman has been detained in a Sharm el-Sheikh hospital since April, and he is due to go on trial on August 3 on charges of murdering anti-regime protesters and of corruption.

Four policemen suspected of attacking journalists at a demonstration in the Jordanian capital were arrested on Saturday, officials said.

"So far, four police officers suspected of being linked to the attacks on journalists have been arrested," said a statement from the criminal investigation department received by Agence France Presse.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been receiving treatment for blast wounds in Saudi Arabia since early June, will return "soon," deputy information minister Abdo al-Janadi said Saturday.

"The president is in good health. He will return to Yemen soon, but is awaiting the decision of his doctors," Janadi told a news conference, without specifying a date for Saleh's return.