An envoy of Syrian President Bashar Assad was to hold talks on Wednesday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has been urging the Damascus regime to halt its crackdown on protesters.

Erdogan would host afternoon talks with Hassan Turkmani in Ankara on "the developments in Syria", a government source told Agence France Presse.

Dozens of alleged al-Qaida gunmen attacked security and government buildings in the southern Yemeni town of Huta on Wednesday killing a policeman and wounding six others, medics and residents said.

Fierce clashes broke out at dawn between the armed men and police around the local branches of intelligence and central bank, and the courts in Huta, in the Lahij province, residents said.

Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping to convince at least 30 countries to vote against recognizing a Palestinian state should the United Nations debate the issue in September, media reports said.

"Before we reach September, we have to push through an initiative to secure 30 countries and more who will say 'no' to the unilateral recognition in the U.N. General Assembly," the Israeli premier was quoted as saying by news website Ynet.

Oil-rich Gulf states will press their efforts to broker an end to a political crisis in impoverished Yemen, the UAE foreign minister said on Tuesday.

"The unstable situation in Yemen is top of our agenda," Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan told a foreign ministers' meeting of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council in the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Shells and rockets fired during combat in battle-torn Libya breached the border with Tunisia on Tuesday, witnesses told Agence France Presse, one reporting a large Tunisian military presence on the frontier.

A resident told AFP he counted 10 shells that landed inside Tunisian territory, some of them north of the city of Oued Erouth in a district to the west of Dehiba, about 1.5 kilometers from the border.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday accused Iran of backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's "vicious assaults" against pro-democracy protesters.

"Iran is supporting the Assad regime’s vicious assaults on peaceful protesters and military actions against its own cities," Clinton said, comparing its response to Iran's crackdown on pro-reform protests in 2009.

Canada recognizes Libyan rebels as the "legitimate representative" of the people of Libya, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said Tuesday.

The diplomatic shift came as parliamentarians debated an extension of Canada's participation in NATO's efforts to protect Libyan civilians from forces loyal to strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in Cairo next week to finalize a new government put together by the two factions, a top official of his Fatah movement said Tuesday.

The meeting was announced as Palestinian factions were in Cairo for reconciliation talks aimed at choosing a prime minister to head the unity government.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan telephoned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Tuesday and urged him to stop a bloody crackdown on protesters and launch reforms, Anatolia news agency reported.

Erdogan told the Syrian leader to "refrain from violence and end the unrest" that has swept Syria since anti-regime protests erupted in March, the report said.

Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Tuesday called on Bahrain to pardon two Shiite protesters sentenced to death over the killing of two policemen in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.

"I ask the government of Bahrain to grant an amnesty for the two young people sentenced to death for participating in peaceful demonstrations," he said in a statement from his movement's headquarters in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf.