The opposition Syrian National Council said on Tuesday that it is too early to form a government in exile and that a leading dissident's announcement that he had been tasked with forming one was damaging.

"The formation of a government in exile was a hasty decision, and we wish it had not happened," SNC chief Abdel Basset Sayda told Agence France Presse. "It actually weakens the opposition."

For 16 months, Syria's two biggest cities Damascus and Aleppo were seen as safe havens from the country's bloodshed, but deadly fighting over the past two weeks is forcing people who took refuge there to flee yet again.

Displaced at least twice since fleeing the flashpoint central city of Homs in March, one family is now looking to escape Damascus and possibly return home, after the capital was engulfed in violence last week.

An attacker stabbed three Eritrean men in a south Tel Aviv video store on Tuesday in what police said they were initially treating as a racist attack.

"All three people that were stabbed were taken to hospital with light to moderate injuries," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

Kuwait parliament failed Tuesday to hold its first session after it was reinstated by a court ruling as a majority of MPs boycotted the meeting amid a lingering political crisis.

Speaker Jassem al-Khorafi adjourned the session for next week after only six MPs of the 50-member house and several cabinet ministers turned up for the meeting boycotted by both pro-government and opposition lawmakers.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Cairo on Tuesday for a lightning visit to the longtime Middle East ally to reaffirm U.S. support for Egypt's democratic transition, Agence France Presse reported.

The Pentagon chief is due to meet Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, and newly elected Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Twin car bombs in Baghdad killed 12 people and wounded at least 27 others on Tuesday, while another attack west of the capital left two people dead, security and medical officials said.

An interior ministry official said the twin blasts in Baghdad's central Karrada area killed 12 people and wounded 27.

Gunmen shot dead a television presenter and wounded his mother, wife and baby in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a media rights group said on Tuesday.

The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory said in a statement that Ghazwan Anis, from satellite channel Sama al-Mosul, was killed and that his four-month-old son was among family members who were wounded.

Iraqi Kurdish forces gave basic training to Syrian Kurds to fill any "security gap" should the Syrian regime fall, a top official in the party of the Kurdistan region's president said on Tuesday.

A "very small" number of young Syrian Kurds "were trained in basic training in camps in the region in order to fill any security gap after the fall of the Syrian regime," Hayman Hawrami, the head of the external relations department in the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), told Agence France Presse.

A firefight erupted Tuesday between Yemeni security forces and gunmen, dressed in police uniforms, who had been surrounding the headquarters of the interior ministry, witnesses said.

The gunmen, who were previously working unofficially in Yemen's police department, had been surrounding the ministry's headquarters in al-Hasaba district of Sanaa since Sunday, demanding that they be enrolled back into the impoverished country's police force.

The widow of Yasser Arafat on Tuesday formally asked for a French investigation into his death, bringing a complaint of assassination weeks after raising new suspicions that the former Palestinian leader was poisoned before his 2004 death in a French military hospital.

Earlier this month, Palestinian authorities gave final approval for Arafat's body to be exhumed. In recent tests of Arafat's belongings requested by his widow and the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, a Swiss lab detected elevated traces of polonium-210 — a rare and highly lethal substance — but said the findings were inconclusive and that Arafat's bones would have to be tested. And questions remain about the results of any additional tests after so long.