The Ras al-Ain branch of the Kurdish National Council in Syria called on the Syrian opposition on Saturday to intervene over an ongoing jihadist assault on the northern city located on the Turkish border.

"Since Wednesday morning, some armed groups have launched an offensive against innocent and unarmed civilians in Ras al-Ain using various types of heavy weapons and sowing fear and panic among children and women," a statement said.

A court in southeast Yemen on Saturday jailed three Somali pirates for 10 years each after convicting them of hijacking boats in the Gulf of Aden, Saba state news agency said.

The defendants went on trial in 2011 after being charged with hijacking a Yemeni fishing boat and a foreign yacht with the aim of using the Yemeni vessel to carry out piracy attacks, Saba said.

Syria's foreign ministry on Saturday decried a petition by 58 countries calling for a war crimes case against Damascus, in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council.

"The Syrian government regrets the persistence of these countries in following the wrong approach and refusing to recognize the duty of the Syrian state to protect its people from terrorism imposed from abroad," it said.

The United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF) on Saturday denounced violence over the past week in Syria in which dozens of children were killed.

"A series of reports from Syria this week underlines the terrible price children are paying" in a conflict that has ravaged the country for 22 months and left more than 60,000 people dead, according to U.N. figures.

Gunmen in southeast Yemen have blown up an oil pipeline that transports some 8,000 barrels per day to export terminals on the Gulf of Aden, suspending operations, a local official said on Saturday.

The unidentified assailants "planted an explosive device under the pipeline" overnight in the village of Rudum in Shabwa province, some 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the Nushaymah export terminal, the official said.

Egypt's government unlawfully expelled two Syrian refugees back to the war-ravaged country last week, and two Palestinians from Syria now risk being deported, the watchdog Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.

A Palestinian man and his son currently being held at Cairo airport were apparently refused entry to Egypt and would face "indiscriminate violence and possible persecution if returned to Syria," the New York-based group said.

U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay made a new demand Friday for the divided Security Council to order an International Criminal Court war crimes investigation in Syria.

Her call added to a petition by 58 countries calling for a war crimes case over the 22-month-old conflict in which the United Nations says more than 60,000 people have been killed, mostly by President Bashar Assad's forces.

A sniper killed an Al-Jazeera reporter in southern Syria on Friday, the pan-Arab television network said, in the second such shooting of a journalist in two days in the conflict-swept country.

The killings take the death toll of reporters who have died in Syria's 22-month conflict to at least 20, according to a count by Agence France Presse and Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, or RSF.

Palestinians set up tents and began work on a permanent structure in a West Bank village on Friday to protest Israel's intention to confiscate land, an activist said.

"We pitched two tents and began building a new structure using concrete and stones in an area in Beit Iksa which Israel wants to take for settlement," Said Yaqine told AFP.

Police in Egypt clashed on Friday with a crowd of furious Muslims who tried to storm a church after claiming that a Coptic man had tried to sexually abuse a six-year-old Muslim girl, security sources said.

Dozens of Muslims went on the rampage in the southern city of Qena, destroying two Coptic-owned shops and then marching on the church in a bid to storm it before police fired tear gas to disperse them, the sources said.