Syrian troops backed by helicopter gunships clashed with rebels near a barracks in Aleppo on Friday as battles broke out around a military airport elsewhere in the northern province, monitors said.

In Damascus, state news agency SANA said the army unearthed the bodies of 25 people shot execution-style in the Qadam district and blamed "armed terrorist groups," the regime's term for rebels.

Iran proudly paraded its military hardware in Tehran on Friday under the gaze of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who used the event to again defiantly lash out at the West and Israel.

The display, involving thousands of military personnel, tanks and missiles borne on trucks, marked the anniversary of the start of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

The veteran leader of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party told Agence France Presse that the authorities would crack down on hardline Salafists after deadly violence around the U.S. embassy, saying they pose a threat to the country's freedoms and security.

"Each time that parties or groups overstep our freedoms in a flagrant manner, we have to be tough, clamp down and insist on public order," Ennahda chief Rached Ghannouchi told AFP in an interview.

Israeli security forces wounded a 19-year-old Palestinian in the leg when they opened fire with live ammunition in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Palestinian medics said.

He was one of a group of young men throwing stones at Israelis manning a checkpoint at Beitunia, near Ramallah, and was taken to hospital in the city, the medics said.

Last week's deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi was a "terrorist attack," the White House confirmed Thursday.

"It is self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One. "Our embassy was attacked violently and the result was four deaths of American officials. That's self-evident."

Tunisia said it was banning all demonstrations on Friday after receiving a tip-off about preparations for violence over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published by a French satirical weekly.

"The interior ministry, using its powers under the state of emergency and in order to maintain public order, announces that it is outlawing any form of demonstration anywhere in Tunisian territory on Friday," a ministry statement said on Thursday.

President Bashar Assad has hit out at Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, accusing them of arming Syrian rebels but insisting they will not win, according to excerpts from an interview to appear in an Egyptian newspaper on Friday.

"They suddenly saw money in their hands after a long period of poverty and think they can buy history and play a regional role," Assad told al-Ahram al-Arabi, which put excerpts from the interview on its website on Thursday.

Shelling by Syrian government forces trying to win back a border post seized by rebels left two Turkish civilians wounded Thursday, a Turkish official told AFP.

They were injured by four fragments of a shell that exploded just on the Syrian side of the border, the official said on condition of anonymity, adding that another unexploded shell was found and the area sealed off while it was detonated.

Israel has dismissed plans to hold a summit on creating a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, saying it was unrealistic to push such an idea given the "current volatile and hostile" climate in the region.

"Any initiative to promote the 2012 conference on the Middle East.. in complete disregard to the present sombre regional realities, is futile," Shaul Horev, head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) said on Wednesday.

At least 30 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded Thursday in an explosion at a petrol station in northeastern Syria, a human rights group said, with activists saying it was an air strike.

"At least 30 people were killed and 83 were injured, although unconfirmed sources say the number of dead was actually more than 50," the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.