The United States remains committed to strong ties with Egypt, a U.S. official said Saturday, after tensions over the treatment of U.S. activists who had been barred from leaving Cairo.

"We have all been focused over these past few weeks on the NGO issue, and it is a matter of serious continuing concern for the United States," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement.

Iraq will take further measures to secure its border with Syria in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling and trafficking, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office said on Saturday.

The statement, which offered no specifics, is the second announcement in two weeks that Iraq will tighten the roughly 600-kilometer frontier with Syria, amid a nearly 12-month bloody crackdown by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime on an anti-government revolt.

The bodies of two Western journalists killed in Syria were handed over to the French ambassador and to a Polish diplomat in Damascus on Saturday, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Veteran US reporter Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in a rocket attack in the rebel Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs on February 22.

Syrian forces killed some 700 people and wounded thousands in a 27-day bombardment of Homs, with shells sometimes falling at the rate of 100 an hour, Human Rights Watch said.

HRW urged the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution demanding an end to "end indiscriminate shelling of cities and allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and the safe passage of civilians and the injured."

A senior Hamas official in Gaza said on Saturday the Palestinian Islamist movement was not taking sides in the conflict between the regime and the insurgency in Syria.

"Our position on Syria is the same as on other Arab revolutions," said Mahmud Zahar.

An al-Qaida splinter group claimed Saturday to have carried out a suicide attack on a military base in southern Algeria which left 24 people wounded.

"We inform you that we are behind the explosion that occurred this morning at Tamanrasset," a message sent to Agence France Presse and signed by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa said.

The Syrian army launched an offensive early Saturday against rebels in the village of Ain al-Beida, not far from the border with Turkey, the Turkish news agency Anatolia reported.

It quoted witnesses as saying around 2,000 soldiers and 15 tanks were involved in the operation to seize control of the village only a few kilometers (miles) from Turkey.

Egypt's parliament is to probe and "hold accountable" anyone who intervened to allow foreign activists on trial to leave the country, the house speaker said on Saturday.

Saad al-Katatni said parliament would summon officials to explain the decision and "hold accountable those responsible for this crime, which represented a blatant intervention in the affairs of Egypt's judiciary."

A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle in the Syrian city of Daraa on Saturday, killing two people and wounding 20, including security force personnel, the official SANA news agency reported.

The "suicide terrorist" struck near the al-Masri roundabout in the center of the city, south of Damascus, which was the cradle of the uprising that erupted against President Bahar Assad's regime in March last year, SANA said.

Syrian troops shelled Saturday several districts in the rebellious central city of Homs where a standoff continued between a Red Cross convoy and the government that has blocked the delivery of food, medical supplies and blankets to the thousands still stranded in the area.

Abu Hassan al-Homsi, a doctor at a makeshift clinic in Khaldiyeh district of Homs, said he treated a dozen wounded.