The head of Tunisia's anti-Islamist Nidaa Tounes party, Beji Caid Essebsi, was on Tuesday leading the country's first presidential election since a 2011 revolution that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.

But with no outright winner from Sunday's poll, in which Essebsi took a lead of six percentage points over incumbent Moncef Marzouki, a runoff will be held in December.

Paris is pushing for "safe zones" to be set up in Syria where citizens would be out of reach of regime forces and Islamic State jihadists, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday.

Fabius said the country was working alongside U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura who has proposed a "freeze" in fighting in Syria's second city of Aleppo.

A new air strike hit the Libyan capital's sole operational airport on Tuesday, a day after a raid claimed by forces loyal to a prominent anti-Islamist general, witnesses said.

Mitiga air base, in an eastern suburb of Tripoli, has been the city's only working airfield since damage from heavy fighting forced the closure of its civilian airport in July.

Special forces in Yemen rescued eight hostages including "a foreigner" on Tuesday just hours after Al-Qaida seized them at an air base in the violence-wracked country, military officials said.

Seven Yemeni soldiers and a man three Yemeni military sources said was an American -- despite denials -- were abducted when the militants assaulted Al-Anad base in the southern province of Lahij.

Rescue teams battled to free 15 people trapped in the rubble of a Cairo apartment block early Tuesday after it collapsed during the night, killing at least 10 others.

The Egyptian capital's emergency services chief General Mamduh Abdelkader said that investigators were still probing the cause of the collapse in the poor eastern neighbourhood of Matariya but that illegal construction work was suspected.

Everywhere you turn, walls in the Gaza Strip are covered with paint -- brightly colored slogans, political portraits and prose.

For youth in the besieged enclave packed with 1.8 million people, graffiti is an important tool for self-expression and fighting back.

The front line that slices through Aleppo separates the ancient Syrian city's residents into two distinct worlds, the only thing uniting them the fear of stepping into a sniper's sights.

This feeling is eerily similar on each side of the line, scanned by gunmen perched in once residential buildings.

Former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh on Monday accused his successor of helping Shiite Huthi militias overrun Sanaa to curb the growing influence of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.

Saleh, who has been slapped with U.N. Security Council and U.S. sanctions for obstructing peace, said in a television interview he had played "no role" in supporting the unopposed seizure of the capital by the Huthis, known also as Ansarullah, in September. 

Israeli rabbi Yehuda Glick, who survived a murder attempt after calling for Jewish prayer rights at Jerusalem's flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque compound, defended his stance on his release from hospital Monday.

Glick was shot four times by a masked gunman in Jerusalem on October 29.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon urged Israel and the Palestinians on Monday to step back from the brink and return to peace talks before time runs out.

"The Israeli and Palestinian people face a shared fate on shared land.  There is no erasing the other," Ban told a U.N. committee on Palestinian rights.