Faruq Hosni, who was Egypt's culture minister for more than two decades under ousted president Hosni Mubarak, was cleared on Saturday of corruption charges, a judicial source said.

A criminal court in the Giza suburb of Cairo "found Faruq Hosni not guilty on charges of corruption and illegal enrichment," the source said.

Israeli soldiers on Saturday were trying to break up clashes between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the northern West Bank town of Qusra.

Palestinian security sources and eyewitnesses said settlers used the cover of fog to approach the town south of Nablus with the aim of uprooting dozens of olive saplings, but were confronted by farmers who threw stones at them.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is responding well to treatment in Germany after suffering a stroke and has moved on to rehabilitation, his office said in a statement on Saturday.

Talabani, 79, traveled to Berlin last month after what state television reported was a stroke, the latest in a series of health problems he has suffered in recent years.

A Moammar Gadhafi-era security official has been killed in Libya's second city Benghazi, local officials said Saturday, in the latest attack highlighting a lack of security in the east of the country.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Nasser al-Magrabi was found dead on his farm last night," an official in Benghazi's criminal investigations department told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt on Saturday called for a peaceful solution to the conflict roiling Syria, but said the terms of a settlement to end the bloodshed there must be defined by the Syrian people.

"A peaceful solution in Syria is necessary and it is desired by Arab countries and the international community," Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at a joint news conference with his Egyptian counterpart Mohammed Kamel Amr.

The Algerian army has identified one of seven armed Islamists killed east of the capital earlier this month as a key financier of the local affiliate of al-Qaida, the El Watan newspaper reported on Saturday.

Izza Rezki, also known as Abou Djaffar, took up arms against the government in 1994, early in Algeria's devastating civil war, and was a key aide of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) leader Abdelmalek Droukdel, the paper said.

Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi will visit Egypt next week for talks on bilateral ties and the crisis in Syria, the ISNA news agency reported Saturday quoting an Iranian diplomat.

Salehi will meet with his counterpart Mohammed Kamel Amr and President Mohammed Morsi during his two-day visit which begins on January 9, said Mojtaba Amani, the head of Tehran's interests section in Cairo.

Israeli former foreign minister Tzipi Livni called on Saturday for three center and center-left parties to run a joint list against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a January 22 general election.

Livni said her newly formed HaTnuah party had received positive responses from both Labor and the secular Yesh Atid party of former journalist Yair Lapid.

Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, Saddam Hussein's vice president and the highest-ranking member of his regime still on the run, has backed ongoing rallies in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq in an online video.

The 53-minute video, posted on YouTube on Friday, shows Duri reading a prepared statement behind a desk with a small Saddam-era flag atop it, and appears to be his first video message since April 2012.

The aging Christians holed up inside a retirement home in the devastated northern Syrian city of Aleppo have no light, no telephone lines, and little idea of what is happening in the outside world.

But fellow Christians and rebel fighters still ensure they do not go hungry, bringing the dozen or so residents whatever food they can every day.