Vandals scrawled Hebrew threats on two mosques in a West Bank village in the latest hate crime by suspected Jewish extremists, a local official said on Sunday.
"Settlers came in the middle of the night and wrote threats in Hebrew on the walls of two mosques and slashed the tires of a car," said Adel al-Shaer, a councilor for Teqoa village east of Bethlehem.

Saudi Arabia has given illegal foreign workers a three-month grace period to legalize their status, after panic over reported mass deportations, an official statement said.
King Abdullah ordered the interior and labor ministries to allow "workers violating the labor and residency system a maximum of three months to rectify their situation," said the statement carried by SPA state news agency.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Turkish leaders Sunday to speedily restore full diplomatic relations with Israel, two American allies the U.S. sees as anchors of stability in a Middle East wracked by Syria's civil war, Arab Spring political upheavals and the potential threat posed by Iran's nuclear program.
Turkey, however, demanded that Israel end all "embargoes" against the Palestinians first.

Hackers launched a massive international cyber attack campaign against Israeli government websites on Saturday and Sunday, amid numerous threats from the Anonymous hacker collective.
The global hacker group had promised a mass assault to protest Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. The attack appeared timed to coincide with Israel's annual Holocaust memorial day, beginning at sundown Sunday.

Israel said it was time for world powers to adopt a "firmer stand" with Iran on its controversial nuclear program after their latest round of negotiations closed on Saturday without any breakthrough.
"It is time for the world to take a firmer stand and tell the Iranians in no uncertain terms that the masquerade of negotiations is about to end," Strategic Affairs and Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said.

Hamas police on Saturday dispersed a protest in the Gaza town of Rafah by Salafist women to demand the release of members of the hardline Islamist movement, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.
Witnesses said the women, who numbered around 30, were veiled and accompanied by children, carried a banner which read: "Where are human rights organizations when our children are arrested?"

Turkey's foreign minister on Saturday hit back at Syrian President Bashar Assad's claims in an interview that Ankara made a pact with Israel against Damascus.
"Such arguments like Turkey is in cooperation with Israel against Syria have no grounds," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

Egypt's public prosecutor ordered on Saturday an investigation into allegations that President Mohamed Morsi defamed the powerful intelligence service by saying it hired thugs, a judicial source said.
Morsi's office has denied the accusation, initially reported by an Islamist politician Abul Ela Madi who said the president alleged in a conversation that the General Intelligence Service hired several hundred thousand "thugs".

Tunisia's main trade union confederation, the UGTT, lashed out on Saturday at the Islamist-led government for failing to crack down on a militia for attacking their headquarters in December.
General Union of Tunisian Workers secretary general Houcine Abassi accused the government of lacking the "political will to recognize that the UGTT was attacked by the League for Protecting the Revolution (LPR)," a group said to support the government.

Hamas accused Western and Arab spy agencies on Saturday of operating in the Gaza Strip and said it had a list of alleged collaborators.
"The Gaza Strip is swarming with Western intelligence agencies, such as the American, British, French and German services," said Mohammed Lafi, an internal security chief, quoted on the Hamas interior ministry website.
