Violence in Syria cost at least 10 lives on Saturday as a U.N force to oversee a truce neared half its planned .strength, monitors said.

In Idlib province, a stronghold near the Turkish border of rebels fighting President Bahar Assad's regime, security force gunfire killed a man and a woman during a series of raids, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Israeli and Egyptian officials are making progress in attempts to end a mass hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners, some of them close to death, Gaza's Hamas prime minister said on Saturday.

"There was progress in talks between Egypt and Israel," Ismail Hanieh said in a statement. "This is an important development concerning the demands of the prisoners."

Two Turkish journalists who were detained for two months in Syria are on their way home following mediation by Iran, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced Saturday.

"I have just spoken with Iranian Foreign Minister (Ali Akbar) Salehi. Our two journalists, Adem Ozkose and Hamit Coskun, about whom we had no news since they left for Syria, are on their way to Tehran now," Davutoglu said on Twitter.

The United States said Friday it was partially resuming sales of military supplies to Gulf Arab ally Bahrain after having frozen most shipments last year amid a bloody crackdown on protests.

But in a nod to concerns over ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said "the items that we are releasing are not used for crowd control."

Algeria's Islamists were reeling Saturday from a stinging setback in legislative polls which saw the ruling party come out on top, resisting the Arab Spring's tide of democratic change.

The regime argued that the results showed Algerians' desire for stability, at a time when regime change was bringing chaos to other countries, and outright rejection of Islamism, whose rise 20 years ago led to civil war.

A large explosion went off near an office of the ruling Baath party in Syria's second city of Aleppo on Friday evening, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"A big explosion was heard near al-Jabiri Square. It targeted an office of the Baath party, according to initial reports," the Britain-based watchdog said in a statement.

Israeli President Shimon Peres, 88, was admitted to hospital on Friday for what his spokeswoman called a "very, very simple" operation for a hernia.

Spokeswoman Ayelet Frish told Agence France Presse that during a five-day state visit to Canada this week Peres was diagnosed with a hernia and treated by his personal physician, who accompanied him on the trip.

Syria's authorities have refused to submit a report on torture in the country to a United Nations committee scheduled to discuss the situation there next week, its secretary said on Friday.

The Committee Against Torture monitors the implementation of the U.N.'s anti-torture convention by state parties and is currently meeting in Geneva.

Algeria's former single party tightened its grip on power in an election that bucked the regional trend, according to results Friday that drew accusations of fraud from the defeated Islamists.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's National Liberation Front (FLN) won 220 out of 462 seats up for grabs in Thursday's election, the first since the Arab Spring, improving on its share in the outgoing national assembly.

Saudi King Abdullah on Friday sacked one of his advisers, an outspoken critic of the sexes mingling outside the home, something banned in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

The state news agency SPA published the decree announcing the dismissal of Sheikh Abdul Mohsen al-Obeikan, an adviser to the royal cabinet, without providing further details.