Some 200 Palestinians gathered on Saturday at a new encampment in a West Bank village, protesting for the second consecutive day Israel's intention to confiscate land.

"We have settled on the lands of the Beit Iksa village to prevent its confiscation by the Israeli army," Osama Zayed, village resident and one of the organizers of the initiative, told AFP.

An Egyptian court on Saturday dropped charges against 379 people involved in clashes against the police in 2011, following a decree by President Mohamed Morsi granting them amnesty, the official MENA news agency said.

The 379 had been accused of injuring policemen during November 2011 clashes on Mohammed Mahmoud street, near Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square, that left dozens dead.

Just a few months ago, Ali Naema was playing in the Syrian army band.

Today, he's making war, not music -- but with the rebels, having swapped sides and his trumpet for an AK-47 assault rifle to join the fight against his former comrades with the aim of toppling President Bashar Assad.

The Ras al-Ain branch of the Kurdish National Council in Syria called on the Syrian opposition on Saturday to intervene over an ongoing jihadist assault on the northern city located on the Turkish border.

"Since Wednesday morning, some armed groups have launched an offensive against innocent and unarmed civilians in Ras al-Ain using various types of heavy weapons and sowing fear and panic among children and women," a statement said.

A court in southeast Yemen on Saturday jailed three Somali pirates for 10 years each after convicting them of hijacking boats in the Gulf of Aden, Saba state news agency said.

The defendants went on trial in 2011 after being charged with hijacking a Yemeni fishing boat and a foreign yacht with the aim of using the Yemeni vessel to carry out piracy attacks, Saba said.

Syria's foreign ministry on Saturday decried a petition by 58 countries calling for a war crimes case against Damascus, in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council.

"The Syrian government regrets the persistence of these countries in following the wrong approach and refusing to recognize the duty of the Syrian state to protect its people from terrorism imposed from abroad," it said.

The United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF) on Saturday denounced violence over the past week in Syria in which dozens of children were killed.

"A series of reports from Syria this week underlines the terrible price children are paying" in a conflict that has ravaged the country for 22 months and left more than 60,000 people dead, according to U.N. figures.

Gunmen in southeast Yemen have blown up an oil pipeline that transports some 8,000 barrels per day to export terminals on the Gulf of Aden, suspending operations, a local official said on Saturday.

The unidentified assailants "planted an explosive device under the pipeline" overnight in the village of Rudum in Shabwa province, some 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the Nushaymah export terminal, the official said.

Egypt's government unlawfully expelled two Syrian refugees back to the war-ravaged country last week, and two Palestinians from Syria now risk being deported, the watchdog Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.

A Palestinian man and his son currently being held at Cairo airport were apparently refused entry to Egypt and would face "indiscriminate violence and possible persecution if returned to Syria," the New York-based group said.

U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay made a new demand Friday for the divided Security Council to order an International Criminal Court war crimes investigation in Syria.

Her call added to a petition by 58 countries calling for a war crimes case over the 22-month-old conflict in which the United Nations says more than 60,000 people have been killed, mostly by President Bashar Assad's forces.