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.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird held what he termed "positive" talks with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Saturday despite their differences.

Baird, on a four-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and foreign minister Riyad al-Malki.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry headed to Turkey Saturday on a wide-ranging tour set to be dominated by many of the top world crises -- Syria, the Middle East peace process and North Korea.

After a plane door problem delayed his flight, Kerry flew out of Andrews Air Force Base on his way to Istanbul, where he will meet Sunday with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss the unrelenting conflict in Syria.

Syrian rebel prime minister Ghassan Hitto has begun talks to form an interim government of 11 ministries to administer the whole of Syria, the opposition said on Saturday.

"The interim government is the executive authority that will extend its authority over all national Syrian territory, and it will consist of 11 ministries," said the main opposition Syrian National Coalition.

Nine children were among at least 15 people killed in an air strike on a majority Kurdish district in the Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, a watchdog said.

"The number of people killed in an air strike on the western edges of Sheikh Maksoud has risen to 15... Among them were nine children aged under 18 years and three women," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A coordinated attack involving a suicide bomber at an open-air election campaign meeting in central Iraq killed 25 people on Saturday, the latest in a spike in unrest two weeks before provincial polls.

The assault raises further questions over the credibility of the election, Iraq's first since 2010, and comes some 10 years after the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein and aimed to usher in a stable democracy but instead unleashed brutal violence which continues to plague the country.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas may fire prime minister Salam Fayyad, a Fatah member said, as the party criticized the premier's government as being "improvised and confused."

Abbas "is leaning towards dismissing Fayyad from the head of the government and forming a new one," a member of Fatah's Revolutionary Council told Agence France Presse late on Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity.