Iran was urged by human rights groups on Tuesday to drop the death sentence given to a man convicted of insulting the Prophet Mohammed in several Facebook posts.

Soheil Arabi was found guilty in August and the decision was upheld by Iran's Supreme Court last month.

An Islamic State-linked media group has released a video claiming to show the shooting of a Danish national by its "supporters" in Saudi Arabia last month, U.S.-based monitoring group SITE said.

Denmark has confirmed that one of its nationals was shot and wounded in the Saudi capital Riyadh on November 22.

Syria's civil war has killed more than 200,000 people in less than four years, a monitoring group told Agence France Presse on Tuesday, adding that most were fighters from the two sides.

"We have documented the killing of 202,354 people since March 2011," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman said, adding that more than 130,000 of them were combatants.

Tunisia's new parliament held its inaugural session on Tuesday, a landmark in the country's often fraught transition to democracy since the 2011 revolution which sparked the Arab Spring.

After the singing of the national anthem, National Constituent Assembly (NCA) speaker Mustapha Ben Jaafar opened the gathering of 217 members of parliament who were elected in October. 

Egypt's public prosecutor said Tuesday it would appeal a court ruling that dropped a murder charge against ex-president Hosni Mubarak over the deaths of protesters during the country's 2011 uprising.

"The prosecutor general has decided to appeal," it said in a statement, after a Cairo court on Saturday ordered the dropping of murder and corruption charges against Mubarak, who ruled for three decades until being driven from office.

A draft resolution to revive talks on a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement is expected be presented to the U.N. Security Council by the middle of the month, the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations said Monday.

Palestinian representative Riyad Mansour said the text being shepherded by France is expected to lay out a timeframe for negotiations on a final peace deal and possibly a second deadline for Palestinian statehood.

Floods triggered by torrential rains have killed 11 people in Morocco, a week after a storm left 36 dead, a television report said Monday.

Storms again lashed the south of the kingdom, with the resort of Agadir experiencing the equivalent of an entire year's rainfall -- more than 250 millimetres (10 inches) -- between Friday and Sunday.

The World Food Program (WFP) on Monday suspended food aid to more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, blaming a financing crisis caused by unhonored cash pledges.

The Rome-based U.N. agency said refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt risked going hungry this winter if donors do not urgently provide the $64 million (51 million euros) needed to finance the distribution of food vouchers through December.

Washington ruled out Monday any imminent plans to create a no-fly zone along the Turkey-Syria border, brushing aside reports that the White House is in talks with Ankara about a refugee safe haven.

President Barack Obama's spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters the U.S. was "open to discussing a range of options with the Turks" but that a no-fly zone over Syria was not on the table "at this point."

Warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State group hit dozens of jihadist vehicles and bases, including an "electronic warfare garrison," in four days of strikes, the U.S. military said Monday.

Between November 28 and December 1, coalition aircraft and drones bombed targets in Iraq and Syria, where they hit militants besieging the town of Kobane and IS headquarters in Raqa.