Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that next week's bid by the Palestinians for U.N. membership had no chance of success and that they would ultimately seek renewed talks.

"Their attempt to be accepted as a member of the United Nations will fail," he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. "That attempt will fail, since it has to pass through the Security Council."

The trial of members of a suspected al-Qaida cell charged with planning attacks against two U.S. military bases in Qatar opened in Riyadh on Saturday.

The cell, dismantled five years ago, comprised 41 members -- including 38 Saudis, a Qatari, an Afghan and a Yemeni -- and was "the most important al-Qaida" operation in Saudi Arabia, the attorney-general said.

Six students were wounded in clashes Saturday on the first day of the academic year between rival groups at Sanaa University, near the epicenter of ongoing protests, a hospital source said.

Two groups, divided between students who backed a resumption of classes and those who did not, came to blows, with stones and other projectiles also being used in the clashes, according to those involved and the medical official.

Syrian security forces killed two people on Saturday as they conducted searches in the northwestern province of Idlib, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The victims, a man and a woman, were killed in the town of Khan Sheikhun, the British-based group told Agence France Presse by telephone.

Forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi fired rockets and scored casualties in a fierce counter-attack in the fugitive ex-Libyan leader's stronghold of Bani Walid Saturday, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

Ambulances rushed dead and wounded fighters as explosions and gunfire thundered in the air, after the attack on a position of interim government fighters several kilometers from the city center.

Turkey Saturday was parachuting in 22 tons of humanitarian aid to the Libyan city of Bani Walid, one of the last holdouts of fallen leader Moammar Gadhafi's supporters, the prime minister's office said.

Two military cargo planes left Ankara on Saturday to bring food to around 10,000 people in Bani Walid in need of urgent help, the office said in a statement on its website.

A group of Russian lawmakers arrived in Damascus Saturday to meet Moscow ally President Bashar Assad and opposition figures in a bid to broker talks aimed at ending violence in the country, news agencies reported.

"Russia cares about the fate of the Syrian people. That's why we want to find a way to stop a negative scenario developing," Russia's Interfax quoted Ilyas Uumakhanov, vice president of the Russian upper house, as saying.

Several hundred Palestinian and Israeli women demonstrated on Saturday on each side of Israel's Qalandiya checkpoint, the main passage point between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Assembling nearly a week ahead of a Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations Security Council, the women all gathered under the slogan "Women want an independent Palestine".

Iraq has recovered $116 million from bank accounts in France belonging to an official from ex-dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, the country's anti-graft watchdog said in a statement seen on Saturday.

The Commission on Integrity said the funds comprised $106 million deposited in UBAF, a French-registered bank whose shareholders include 19 Arab banks and Credit Agricole, and the equivalent of $10 million in foreign currency deposited in several banks in France.

Forces of Libya's new leadership battled diehard remnants of the fallen regime of Moammar Gadhafi on Saturday, after the U.N. eased sanctions and assigned its seat at the world body to the former rebels.

National Transitional Council forces swept further into Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte as at least 6,000 fighters battled in and around one of the ousted despot's final strongholds.