Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas urged Christian pilgrims from around the world to visit the Holy Land to mark the visit of Pope Francis, set for 2014, in a Christmas message on Monday.

The pontiff is to make a brief visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories from May 25, his first to the Holy Land, Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot said last week.

France's interior minister said Monday that a controversy over a joke made by French President Francois Hollande suggesting that Algeria was unsafe, which sparked a diplomatic row with Algiers, "was behind us".

The controversy erupted after Hollande joked during a speech last week to the CRIF Jewish representative group that French Interior Minister Manuel Valls had just returned "safe and sound" from a trip to Algeria, and "that's already a lot."

More than 450 Muslim Brotherhood members imprisoned in Egypt launched a hunger strike Monday over their "inhuman treatment" after being jailed following the military's overthrow of president Mohammed Morsi, the group said.

A Twitter account operated by the Brotherhood, which has largely been driven underground by a massive crackdown, said prisoners have been "banned from family visits, legal counselling, medical care and (live in) overcrowded and unhygienic cells."

President Bashar Assad of Syria, which has been ravaged by conflict for almost three years, said Monday his country is being confronted by a major offensive by Islamist extremists.

"The country is facing a takfiri ideology," Assad said, using a term for Sunni Muslim extremists.

Four suicide bombers attacked a local television station headquarters north of Baghdad on Monday, killing at least four journalists, police officers said.

Two of the bombers blew themselves up, while security forces killed two others when they stormed the building, the officers said.

Two Yemeni policemen and a civilian were killed Monday in a gunfight in the southern city of Daleh, security sources and witnesses said.

The clash erupted when southern secessionists attempted to storm the governorate building to hoist a flag of the former South Yemen, which was an independent state until it was united with the north in 1990.

A UAE court jailed on Monday an American and four other men for one year after they made a YouTube video that mocked Dubai teenagers, The National daily reported.

Shezanne Cassim, a 29-year-old from Minnesota, has been held since April after being charged with endangering the security of the United Arab Emirates under a cybercrimes law.

Palestinian leaders have ruled out the possibility of extending peace talks with Israel beyond their nine-month timeframe, chief negotiator Saeb Erakat said on Monday.

"We turn down any extension," Erakat told the official Voice of Palestine radio station, adding that some of his recent remarks about the matter had been misinterpreted.

Syrian warplanes have killed more than 300 people in an eight-day bombing campaign on Aleppo, with the opposition National Coalition saying it will not attend planned peaced talks if the bombing continues.

The vicious campaign has seen aircraft drop barrels of TNT on rebel-held neighborhoods -- a tactic widely condemned as unlawful -- flooding hospitals with victims, according to activists, medics and others.

Talks on a timetable to form a new Tunisian government under premier-designate Mehdi Jomaa finally began Monday after being postponed three times.

The talks, mediated by the powerful UGTT trade union, will focus on when Jomaa, an independent, takes over from Prime Minister Ali Larayedh of the moderate Islamist Ennahda party.