Palestinian groups are planning celebrations to mark the release of prisoners by Israel as part of a deal to secure the exchange of Gilad Shalit, a statement said on Saturday.

"All organizations have agreed to begin preparations for the reception of the prisoners, to receive them like heroes with official and popular celebrations," said the statement, read out at a news conference in Gaza by a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees.

Egypt's ruling military approved Saturday a law to punish discrimination after clashes between soldiers and Christians killed 25 people in the country's worst violence since a revolt this year.

The amendment to the criminal code states a punishment of a fine no less than 30,000 pounds (5,000 dollars) for discrimination based on "gender, origin, language, religion or beliefs."

A top Saudi official warned on Saturday that the kingdom will not tolerate any riots at the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca next month, at a time of rising tension with Iran.

"We will not allow anything that would disrupt the peace of the hajj pilgrimage and disturb the pilgrims. That is why we shall not tolerate any damage, riots or chaos during the season of hajj or out of it," Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of Mecca province, told reporters.

Arab foreign ministers will meet in Cairo on Sunday to discuss Syrian President Bashar Assad's crackdown on protests, the official MENA news agency reported.

The agency cited the Arab League's deputy leader Ahmed Ben Helli as saying the meeting would be held at the request of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

President Bashar Assad on Saturday announced the creation of an ad hoc committee tasked with preparing a new constitution for Syria within four months, the official SANA news agency said.

It said Assad issued a decree establishing the national committee to draft a new constitution in a period "not exceeding four months from the date of its creation."

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dismissed Saturday U.S. allegations of a Tehran-sponsored assassination plot as "absurd," in his first direct reaction to the claim.

"It's a meaningless and absurd accusation regarding a number of Iranians," he told a crowd in the western city of Gilangharb in a speech carried by state television.

Yemeni police shot dead 12 people and injured dozens of others on Saturday as they opened fire on demonstrators in Sanaa demanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh's resignation, medics said.

Security forces used live rounds as well as tear gas and water cannon to try to disperse hundreds of thousands of Saleh opponents trying to march on loyalist areas of the city center from their Change Square stronghold, witnesses said.

Syrian security forces on Saturday killed two people, one in the capital and the other in the flashpoint central city of Homs, activists said, as the protest movement against President Bashar Assad entered its eighth month with more gunfire and arrests.

"A young man was killed when security forces opened fire on a funeral procession for the child martyr Ibrahim al-Sheban," in Midan, a commercial neighborhood of Damascus, said the Local Coordination Committees (LCC).

A court in Tunisia Friday handed a 15-year jail term to Imed Trabelsi, a relative of the country's ousted president, a legal source told AFP, to add to two other sentences passed this summer.

Trabelsi -- nephew of the wife of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, toppled in a popular uprising in January -- was convicted of having passed bad checks and was also fined 150,000 dinars (76,000 euros, 105,000 dollars).

A U.S. airstrike has killed the media chief for al-Qaida's Yemeni branch along with six other militants, the Defense Ministry and security officials said Saturday, in the second high-profile American missile attack in as many weeks to target the terror group in the country.

A ministry statement on Saturday said Egyptian-born Ibrahim al-Bana and six other militants were killed in the southeastern province of Shabwa on Friday night. Security officials said an American drone carried out the airstrike, which was one of five overnight strikes that targeted suspected al-Qaida positions in Shabwa and the neighboring province of Abyan in Yemen's largely lawless south.