Human Rights Watch called on Moroccan judges to halt convictions based on confessions obtained through torture, saying in a report released on Friday that failure to probe such claims encouraged further abuses by police.

"The country's judicial reform agenda needs to include stronger safeguards to ensure that courts discard as evidence any statement made to the police under torture or ill-treatment," the rights group said.

Food insecurity is on the rise in the West Bank and is jeopardizing stability, the head of the U.N.'s World Food Program said on a visit to the Palestinian territory on Friday.

"High food prices and low wages mean that 1.6 million Palestinians don't know from where their next meal is coming," WFP director Ertharin Cousin told reporters in the West Bank city of Jericho.

Egyptian Islamists gathered for a show of strength in Cairo on Friday ahead of planned opposition protests calling for President Mohammed Morsi to step down, highlighting the tense political divide in the Arab world's most populous state.

Dozens of parties including Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party -- the political arm of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood -- have called for a demonstration outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo's Nasr City neighborhood after noon prayers.

Yemeni tribesmen have freed 11 soldiers after receiving an assurance from a senior commander that he would raise their demand for the release of a clansman, a military source said on Friday.

The soldiers, two of them officers, were released on Thursday evening after successful negotiations between Fourth Region commander General Mohammed Sobeihi and the kidnappers from the Al-Marakisha tribe, the source said.

Syrian troops bombarded the Damascus neighborhood of Qabun on Friday as they pressed a bid to drive rebels out of the district, a watchdog said.

"Regime troops renewed shelling this morning of the Qabun neighborhood and fierce clashes were underway between soldiers and rebels on the outskirts of the area," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A suicide bomber killed three people at a vote counting center west of Baghdad after polls closed in provincial elections but did not damage any ballots, officials said on Friday.

At around 9:00 pm (1800 GMT) on Thursday, a militant dressed as a policeman walked into the main vote counting office in Anbar provincial capital Ramadi and blew himself up, security, medical and election officials said.

Spanish security forces on Friday broke up an al-Qaida-linked network in north Africa suspected of sending fighters to Syria, arresting eight people in early morning raids.

Police launched operations against the ring in Ceuta, a Spanish territory in north Africa, the government said.

An Israeli security guard shot dead a Jewish visitor at Jerusalem's Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, on Friday, mistaking him for a Palestinian militant, police said.

"There was a Jewish guy, an Israeli guy, who was in the bathroom area," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

The U.N. Security Council must consider backing cross-border supplies into Syria because of the mounting suffering from the civil war, the U.N. humanitarian chief said Thursday.

Valerie Amos, head of the U.N. relief agency, slammed the "increasing violence and complete disregard for human life and dignity which has reached unprecedented levels during past weeks."

Islamist parties have called a mass rally Friday as a show of force ahead of planned opposition protests calling for Islamist President Mohamed Morsi to go, highlighting Egypt's highly charged political divide.

The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political arm of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood from which Morsi hails, and several other groups, have called for a "million-man march to protect the revolution" in Cairo's Nasr City neighborhood.