Saudi Arabia on Wednesday beheaded an Afghan man convicted of drug trafficking, the Interior Ministry announced.

Mohammed Omar Khan was arrested after "he received a very large amount of hashish," said the statement cited by the official SPA news agency.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday lashed out at the Syrian opposition for its "obsession" with toppling President Bashar Assad which he said was holding up peace efforts in the country.

"For now, everything is running up against the opposition's obsession with toppling Bashar Assad's regime," Lavrov told reporters at his traditional start-of-year news conference.

Five members of one family -- a couple and three children -- were killed when a missile hit their village in Syria's northern province of Aleppo before dawn on Wednesday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Britain-based watchdog identified the children as aged seven, nine and 11 and said they were killed in a strike on the village of Abu Taltal near the rebel-held town of Al-Bab.

The second-in-command of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has died, a radical Islamist said in his Twitter account, according to a Wednesday report by the SITE Intelligence group.

The Islamist, identified as Abdullah bin Muhammad, said that Saeed al-Shehri, a Saudi, has died "after a long journey in fighting the Zio-Crusader campaign," according to SITE.

Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu stumbled out of a bruising election Wednesday with a reduced majority, faced with having to curb his hawkish Palestinian policy to woo emergent centrist kingmaker Yair Lapid.

In results that defied expectations, the centrist Yesh Atid became Israel's second strongest party, just nine months after it was created by Lapid, a former journalist, who has overnight become the country's newest political star.

Jordan on Wednesday voted in a parliamentary poll snubbed by Islamists who alleged vote buying and shed doubt on turnout figures, slamming as illegitimate what is likely to be an opposition-free body.

The Independent Election Commission announced a turnout of 47 percent of the registered electorate of 2.3 million before polling stations were due to close at 1600 GMT.

French air raids on the fabled Malian city of Timbuktu destroyed a mansion belonging to Libya's former strongman Moammar Gadhafi which was being used by Islamist radicals as their headquarters, officials said.

French planes bombed a major base of the al-Qaida in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) near Timbuktu, a French defense ministry official confirmed on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The last raids took place on Sunday night.

Five suspected al-Qaida militants were killed and several others wounded in a U.S. drone strike on Tuesday north of the Yemeni capital, tribal sources and witnesses said.

The missile attack targeted a group of militants in al-Jawf province near the Saudi border, one tribal source said, as the death toll was revised from three dead.

Benjamin Netanyahu's rightwing Likud-Beitenu list won a narrow majority in Tuesday's election but was weakened by an unexpectedly strong showing by the centrist Yesh Atid, according to exit polls.

The polls, released by Israel's three main television stations, showed Netanyahu's Likud, running on a joint list with the hardline Yisrael Beitenu, winning just 31 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, followed by Yesh Atid with 18-19 and Labor in third place with 17.

Bahrain's King Hamad has called for a new round of national dialogue, previously shunned by the Shiite-led opposition, the government's Information Affairs Authority said.

King Hamad's call follows last month's plea for dialogue made by Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, as protests continue in the Shiite-majority kingdom despite a heavy-handed crackdown on demonstrations in March 2011.