Thousands of Sunnis staged a rally in Manama on Saturday in support of a controversial proposal to unite Bahrain with neighboring Saudi Arabia, witnesses said.

Human Rights Watch accused Egypt's military on Saturday of beating and torturing protesters arrested during clashes with soldiers in Cairo earlier this month.

The New York-based group said soldiers "beat and tortured" protesters arrested in the May 4 clashes outside the defense ministry and arrested at least 350 demonstrators.

Dozens of Palestinian olive trees and grape vines were destroyed and anti-Arab graffiti was daubed in groves of the West Bank village of Beit Omar, residents said on Saturday.

The villagers said the attack had taken place on Friday night or early Saturday and blamed it on Jewish settlers of nearby Bat Ayin settlement, which lies north of the town of Hebron.

Russia's non-intervention stance on Syria remained unchanged on Saturday as G8 leaders looked to hammer out a joint declaration to put greater pressure on President Bashar Assad's regime.

"There cannot be any change of regime through force," the Kremlin's Africa envoy, Mikhail Margelov said, adding that G8 leaders meeting at Camp David had yet to agree on the Syria part of their final summit declaration.

Clashes between al-Qaida gunmen and the army have killed 26 people dead near the jihadists' stronghold of Jaar, and a drone killed two in a strike on a militant vehicle, military and tribal sources said.

"Eight soldiers were killed and 15 others were wounded" in fighting that included artillery and machinegun fire late on Friday on the outskirts of Jaar, in Yemen's south, a military official said.

Residents in the eastern city of Benghazi, cradle of the revolt that led to the ouster and death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, headed to the polls Saturday to elect a local council.

"This is a first step in the transition from revolution to state building," Suleiman Zubi, head of the local electoral committee, told Agence France Presse.

Around 200 protesters rallied on Saturday in front of the Turkish consulate in Basra, southern Iraq, threatening to boycott Turkish companies if Ankara does not hand over Iraq's fugitive vice president.

The demonstrators set fire to a Turkish flag, shouting, "No, No, Turkey!" and "Throw the Turks out!" amid a chill in ties between the neighboring countries.

An Iraqi anti-terror officer, his wife and three children have been shot dead by gunmen in north Baghdad, security and medical officials said on Saturday.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden car outside security headquarters in Syria's biggest eastern city on Saturday, killing nine people and wounding 100, state media said.

The attack was the the first of its kind in Deir al-Zour since an anti-regime uprising broke out in Syria in March 2011, and the deaths there came as at least another 10 people died elsewhere in the country.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon has no "hard" proof that al-Qaida was behind bomb attacks in Syria but is very concerned that terrorist groups are taking advantage of strife in the country, his spokesman said Friday.

Ban said on Thursday that he believed the group founded by the late Osama bin Laden carried out suicide bomb attacks in Damascus on May 10 which left at least 55 dead and nearly 400 wounded.