Egyptian authorities have denied entry to the daughter of the jailed symbol of the Bahraini opposition movement, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, Cairo airport sources said on Monday.

Maryam al-Khawaja flew straight back to Copenhagen after arriving in Cairo on Sunday, having been denied entry "for security reasons," the sources said.

Saudi King Abdullah arrived in Casablanca on Monday for a private visit to Morocco, official sources said.

The 88-year-old monarch was received at the airport by senior Moroccan dignitaries, the official MAP news agency reported.

When the Syrian uprising started, Fatima Zahra sent her five sons off to join the rebel forces and battle the regime, but she wanted to find a way to do more.

So over the course of several months, she transformed her house into a rear base of support for the Free Syrian Army, cooking up massive meals for distribution to the rebels, offering basic medical treatment and care, sheltering army defectors, and even storing weapons in the rooms of her home.

The European Union condemned on Monday a "massacre" in the town of Daraya near Damascus, Syria, where rebels reported the discovery of hundreds of bodies.

"We regret and strongly condemn this sort of violence, it's totally unacceptable," Michael Mann, spokesman for EU foreign affairs High Representative Catherine Ashton, told a news briefing.

An explosion hit the Turkish-Iraqi pipeline overnight Sunday, causing a fire and stopping oil flow to Turkey, local security sources told Agence France Presse on Monday.

The cause of the fire was not immediately clear but suspicions are running high that Kurdish rebels, who have in the past targeted the pipeline or oil smugglers, may have sabotaged it.

Iraqi Communications Minister Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi told Agence France Presse on Monday he quit his post, accusing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of doing nothing to stop "political interference" in his ministry.

"I resigned because Maliki refused to... (Stop) political interference in my ministry," Allawi said by telephone from London, referring to demands he made in late July for an end to meddling in his ministry.

The Etzion settler bloc, which lies southwest of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, is an "integral part" of Greater Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.

"Efrat and Gush Etzion are an integral, basic and understood part of Greater Jerusalem," Netanyahu said while visiting Efrat settlement, in remarks relayed by his bureau.

The United Nations appealed on Monday for $54 million to help meet the growing needs of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in Jordan, particularly children who "suffer most."

The U.N. Children's Fund UNICEF said in a statement the funds are "urgently" needed "to meet the emergency health, protection, and water and sanitation needs of the growing numbers of Syrian refugee children and their families arriving in Jordan."

Gunmen shot dead an Iraqi border forces brigadier general on Monday, among three people killed and six wounded in nationwide violence, security and medical officials said.

Brigadier General Abdul Hussein Mohsen was gunned down by several armed men while he was in the town of Taji, just north of Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.

Some 7,000 Syrian refugees have massed on the border with Turkey, waiting for more camps to be set up to accommodate those fleeing the fighting in Syria, a Turkish diplomat told Agence France Presse on Monday.

"5,000 refugees are waiting on Syrian side of the Oncupinar border crossing in Kilis province and 2,000 others at Reyhanli in Hatay province," said the diplomat.