An Israeli court decided Sunday to shorten the administrative detention of a Palestinian woman freed in a prisoner swap with Israel and refusing food since she was re-arrested, her lawyer said.

Hanaa al-Shalabi has been on hunger strike since the day of her arrest on February 16, when she was originally ordered detained without trial for six months.

Israel "shall prevail" if forced to fight Iran, "an evil, cruel and morally corrupt regime" bent on controlling the Middle East, Israeli President Shimon Peres said in Washington Sunday.

His speech to a powerful pro-Israel lobby charged up the atmosphere for talks Monday between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will tackle the perceived nuclear threat from Iran.

Fierce clashes between the Yemeni army and al-Qaida in the country's restive south killed at least 30 soldiers and 12 militants on Sunday, medics and officials said.

"So far 30 soldiers have been killed and the toll is expected to rise as some bodies have not been transferred to hospital yet," a military official said on condition of anonymity.

Algeria's prime minister vowed on Sunday to eradicate terrorism, a day after a suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden car into a police station in the remote Algerian desert.

Twenty-three people were injured and the attacker killed in Saturday's blast in Tamanrasset, 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) south of Algiers, in what was the first attack of its kind in that part of the country.

Iran's parliament looks certain to be dominated by MPs critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to preliminary election results that also showed a big turnover in lawmakers.

The partial results, from elections held last Friday, accounted for two-thirds of the 290 seats in parliament.

Syrian artillery gunners pounded the mainly rebel-held city of Rastan on Sunday, as 15 people were killed across the country and the Red Cross began delivering aid to refugees from the battered Homs district of Baba Amr, monitors said.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said security forces killed seven people in the central province of Homs, three in the restive countryside around Damascus, one in the northern province of Aleppo, one in the central province of Hama, one in the southern province of Daraa and another in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour.

The international Red Cross said it delivered relief supplies on Sunday to refugees from the battered Baba Amr district of Homs city in a nearby village of central Syria.

"We have started to distribute humanitarian aid in Abel village, three kilometers (two miles) from Baba Amr," International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman Saleh Dabbakeh told AFP.

Israel will take any decisions on Iran's nuclear activities as an "independent state," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday, on the eve of a U.S.-Israel summit in Washington.

"Clearly, the United States is the biggest world power and the biggest and most important country that is a friend of Israel, but we are an independent state," Lieberman told Israeli public radio.

Iran is stepping up its military and intelligence support for Syrian government troops in their crackdown against opposition strongholds, The Washington Post reported late Saturday.

Citing three unnamed U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports from the region, the newspaper said Tehran had increased supplies of arms and other aid for Syrian leader Bashar Assad as he is trying crush resistance in the key city of Homs.

The bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, killed in the bombardment of a rebel flashpoint in Syria last week, were flown into Paris from Damascus Sunday.

Relatives of Ochlik, who was 28, were there to meet his coffin as the regular Air France flight, via Amman, touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in the French capital, an airport source said.