Armed men attacked police headquarters in the Libyan city of Benghazi on Thursday, with five policemen wounded and a nearby resident killed, security and medical officials said.

"An armed group attacked the police headquarters in Benghazi trying to free suspects who were arrested a few days ago," a security official told AFP.

The head of the Roman Catholic church in the Holy Land expressed "dismay" on Friday at a wave of attacks on local Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious sites over the past year.

In his Christmas message, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Fuad Twal, noted "an increase in a certain religious radicalism," with church data showing 25 acts of vandalism, arson and desecration of mosques, churches, synagogues and cemeteries since December 21, 2011.

Most Palestinians support both rocket fire into Israel and their people's enhanced U.N. status while still viewing peaceful negotiation as the best way to achieve statehood, a poll showed on Thursday.

The survey, carried out by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, found a sharp increase in the number of Palestinians who said rocket fire from Gaza into Israel would "help" the Palestinians, in the wake of a November conflict between Israel and Gaza militant groups.

One of Syria's top three Druze religious leaders Sheikh Hussein al-Jarbua, who had close ties to the regime of President Bashar Assad, has died of cancer, state news agency SANA said on Thursday.

PSP leader Walid Jumblat commented on al-Jarbua's death to Agence France Presse, saying that he “will not shed even one tear for a man who supported till the end a regime that massacres its people and whose son Nazih has given out weapons to the shabiha (pro-regime militia),"

Iran has hanged seven men, six of them for drug trafficking and another for rape, in prison in the central province of Isfahan, Kayhan newspaper reported on Thursday.

The seven, aged 25 to 45, were executed on Wednesday, the province's public prosecutor, Mohammad Reza Habibi, said in the report.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday denied propping up Syrian President Bashar Assad and stressed that Moscow was only seeking to avert a perpetual civil war.

"We are not concerned about (Bashar Assad's fate. We understand that the family has been in power for 40 years and there is a need for change," Putin told a major Moscow press briefing.

There are some 11 million Palestinians scattered around the world, including more than five million refugees living throughout the Middle East.

Their plight has made headlines in Syria, where the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugee UNRWA says as many as 100,000 Palestinians may have fled the Yarmuk refugee camp in Damascus in recent days because of fighting.

Top presidential aide Ali Akbar Javanfekr has been given a short leave from Tehran's notorious Evin prison for medical treatment, government-run Iran newspaper reported on Thursday.

Javanfekr "was released at midnight ... his four-day release is for (the purpose) of medical treatment, after which he is committed to return to prison," the daily said in a short report. It did not elaborate.

Egypt's chief public prosecutor on Thursday retracted his resignation, days after offering to step down following protests by prosecutors and judges against his appointment by President Mohammed Morsi.

Talaat Ibrahim Abdallah, who offered his resignation earlier this week, asked to be allowed to remain on in his position, the official MENA news agency reported.

Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, the head of Iraq's largest Christian group, resigned on Wednesday, the Vatican said, announcing that a synod has been convoked for January to elect a successor for a community faced with religious persecution.

Delly, a simple man of faith who campaigned for peace between Muslims and the country's Christian minorities, had been Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church since 2003 and resigned because he had reached the compulsory retirement age of 85.