Germany is prepared to contribute Patriot missiles to a NATO mission to help Turkey at the border with Syria, the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Saturday.

The German army would contribute up to 170 soldiers as well as Patriot anti-aircraft missiles to such a NATO mission, the newspaper said.

Twelve people were killed and three injured when a truck smashed into a minibus near the Egyptian capital on Saturday, police said, just hours after 47 nursery school children died in a road accident.

Officials said a speeding truck driving on the wrong side of the road crashed into a minibus carrying 15 passengers. The truck driver was arrested at the scene in the 6th October area, as rescue services worked to extract the bodies, police said.

Islamic countries must close ranks and respond to Israel's deadly attacks on the Gaza Strip, Iran's Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said on Saturday.

"Putting an end to the Zionist (Israeli) regime's crimes is only possible through a united, revolutionary retaliation by the Muslim world," Vahidi said in remarks carried by the official IRNA news agency.

A car bomb targeting Shiite pilgrims in Iraq killed three people and wounded 25 others on Saturday, during major Shiite religious commemorations, officials said.

The bomb exploded about 1:30 pm (1030 GMT) at a restaurant where three buses carrying pilgrims were parked on a highway near Balad, north of Baghdad, a police officer said.

Egypt and Turkey put the onus on Israel on Saturday to end the fighting around Gaza as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Cairo a day after Washington urged the two governments to pressure the Palestinians.

Erdogan, who headed straight into talks with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi after landing in Cairo, blamed Israel for the latest upsurge in violence.

Syria's new opposition coalition signaled Saturday that it intends to move quickly to establish a broad-based alternative government to the regime of President Bashar Assad.

After talks with French President Francois Hollande, coalition leader Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib assured the international community that the transitional government will be composed of technocrats rather than politicians, and include representatives of all the war-torn country's ethnic and religious groups.

A Turkish journalist who went missing in Syria in August and was believed to have been held by government troops has been freed and handed to Turkish lawmakers touring the country on Saturday, the Anatolia news agency reported.

"I am very happy, I am doing well," Cuneyt Unal was quoted by the agency as saying by telephone from Syria.

Jordan's King Abdullah II on Saturday ordered the dispatch of urgent humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, targeted by Israeli air strikes for a fourth straight day.

The Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization was instructed to "send urgent humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza who are facing suffering and difficult living conditions due to Israeli attacks," the royal palace said.

Syria's new opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib met Saturday with French President Francois Hollande for talks on protection of "liberated" zones, refugees and the formation of a provisional government for the war-torn state.

Hollande and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met Khatib and his two deputies in the Elysee palace for talks that come just four days after France became the first Western country to recognize the newly-formed National Coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people.

A rocket fired by militants in the Gaza Strip lightly wounded four Israeli soldiers on Saturday, the army said, with military sources adding they were "inside a building" at the time.

"Three soldiers were wounded by a rocket which hit the Eshkol regional council," a military spokeswoman said, referring to an area along the southern flank of Israel's border with Gaza.