Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa made his first public appearance in over a month on Sunday, following rumors that he had tried to defect and was under house arrest.

Sharaa, who met the head of the Iranian parliament's foreign policy committee, Aladin Borujerdi, was last seen in public at a state funeral for top security officials who were killed in a Damascus bomb blast on July 18.

Yemeni security forces arrested two suspected al-Qaida members in Aden on Sunday, eight days after a deadly attack on the intelligence services in the southern port city, a security official said.

The two suspected militants were "hiding in a house near the intelligence headquarters" where 19 soldiers were killed in the August 18 rocket attack and suicide bombing which authorities blamed on al-Qaida.

An Egyptian man was reported to be in stable condition after he set fire to himself on Saturday outside the presidential palace in Cairo to protest against losing his job, police officials said.

The employee at a state-owned electricity company had won a court ruling to get back his job, but the company ignored the verdict. He doused himself in petrol and set himself alight as a last resort, the officials said.

Three rockets fired from Gaza hit southern Israel on Sunday, damaging two factories in the border town of Sderot but without causing any casualties, the Israeli army said.

"Two rockets hit two factories in the industrial zone in Sderot, while a third exploded in a nearby field," a spokeswoman said, referring to a town of 24,000 people which lies less than a kilometre (half a mile) from the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Hundreds of bodies have been found in a town outside Damascus after a ferocious five-day assault by the Syrian army, a watchdog said on Sunday, as activists accused government forces of a "massacre".

At least 320 people have been killed during the offensive by government troops in Daraya, a satellite town of some 200,000 people to the southwest of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Gaza's Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya will not attend an upcoming Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran, Taher al-Nounou, a spokesman for the Hamas government, said on Sunday.

"The prime minister received a generous invitation from the Iranian president to participate in the NAM summit," he wrote in a statement, adding that Haniya initially "said he might be going but he decided today to apologize."

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Saturday told Morocco's monarch he would not give in to demands to change his peace envoy on the Western Sahara conflict, diplomats said.

Morocco announced in May that it no longer has confidence in U.N. envoy

Egypt decided on Saturday to reopen a border crossing with Gaza it had mostly kept closed since a militant attack killed 16 of its soldiers on August 5, the official MENA news agency reported.

It said the Rafah border crossing, the Palestinian territory's only passage which bypasses Israel, would return to opening six days a week, like before the attack.

National assembly members have called for the sacking of Libya's defense and interior ministers over the security situation in the country, a member told Agence France Presse.

"There have been demands for the dismissal of the defense and interior ministers but the assembly has called for them to be summoned first to hear them. This should happen later today or tomorrow," he said, asking not to be named.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will boycott the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Iran if his Islamist rival Ismail Haniya of Hamas attends, a minister told Agence France Presse on Saturday.

"President Abbas will not take part in the Non-Aligned summit if Haniya is present, no matter what form his attendance takes," foreign minister Riyad al-Malki said in Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.