Unknown attackers blew up a house north of the Iraqi capital Sunday, killing three members of a family including a five-year-old boy and also wounding a two-year-old girl, an interior ministry official said.

"Unknown gunmen planted three bombs around a house made of mud and reeds in the Taji area, causing it to completely collapse and killing a father, mother and a five-year-old boy," the official said.

Syrian forces killed four civilians on Sunday in shelling of rebel areas and clashed with gunmen, testing a shaky U.N.-backed ceasefire as international monitors prepared to arrive in the unrest-hit country.

Forces loyal to President Bashar Assad subjected the Khaldiyeh and Bayada neighborhoods of the flashpoint central city of Homs to their fiercest bombardment since the truce came into force at dawn on Thursday, monitors said.

Israel deployed hundreds of police Sunday at its main airport to detain activists flying in to protest the country's occupation of Palestinian areas, defying vigorous Israeli government efforts to block their arrival.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said hundreds of protesters were expected to land at Ben-Gurion International Airport in the course of the day. The police contingent at the airport was reinforced to deal with possible unrest or disruptions, he said.

An air strike in southern Yemen has killed at least three suspected al-Qaida militants, the defense ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

A security official said the raid late on Saturday was conducted by a U.S. drone against a moving vehicle carrying al-Qaida operatives in the province of Bayda, some 210 kilometers (130 miles) southeast of the capital Sanaa.

Egypt's election commission said on Saturday that ex-spy chief Omar Suleiman, Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat al-Shater and Salafist politician Hazem Abu Ismail are among 10 candidates barred from running for president.

Commission official Tarek Abul Atta told AFP that Suleiman had been disqualified because he failed to get endorsements from 15 provinces as per law.

Saudi Arabia on Saturday denied any deal with Sweden to build an arms factory, in its first reaction to a weeks-old controversy which led to the resignation of the Swedish defense minister.

"The Saudi Defense Ministry affirms that no accord has been signed in the past with the friendly kingdom of Sweden to build a weapons factory in Saudi Arabia and that no such project exists," state news agency SPA reported.

President Nicolas Sarkozy formally admitted Saturday that France failed in its duty towards the Algerian loyalists who fought on Paris' side in their country's war of independence.

Around 60,000 pro-French Algerians, known as "harkis", came to France after the war, but approximately as many again were abandoned to face bloody reprisals in Algeria at the hands of their pro-independence countrymen.

The U.N. Security Council on Saturday unanimously passed its first resolution on the Syria crisis, allowing an advance party of ceasefire monitors to go to the country on the brink of civil war.

U.N. Resolution 2042 approved the first 30 unarmed military monitors, who U.N. officials said could leave for Damascus within hours.

The Iraqi parliament is investigating possible corruption in preparations for the Arab summit which Baghdad hosted in March at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, an MP said Saturday.

"We have indications that there was corruption (in the preparations for) the Arab summit and we need four to 10 weeks to complete our investigation," MP Bahaa al-Araji said in a statement.

Anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday accused the prime minister of having engineered the arrest of Iraq's electoral chief to serve his own purposes of staying in power.

Faraj al-Haidari, head of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), was detained on Thursday for alleged corruption along with another of the body's members, Karim al-Tamimi.