A bus overturned and hit a lorry parked on the hard shoulder of a motorway outside Dubai on Saturday, killing 13 Asian workers on board and injuring 16, police said.

The crash happened on Emirates Road, a busy route that connects the capital Abu Dhabi to the north of the United Arab Emirates, bypassing Dubai itself.

Violence in Iraq, including the shelling of a militant-held city, a suicide bombing and shootings, killed 20 people on Saturday as officials tallied votes from last month's parliamentary election.

The bloodshed is part of the worst protracted surge in unrest since a brutal Sunni-Shiite sectarian war killed tens of thousands in 2006 and 2007, sparking fears Iraq may be slipping back into all-out conflict.

Two U.S. officers shot and killed two armed civilians who tried to kidnap them last month in Yemen's capital, a State Department official said Friday.

The two Americans were removed from Yemen shortly after the shooting, the official added.

The United States urged both Syria and Russia on Friday to ensure that the remaining stockpile of Syrian chemical weapons is handed over to U.N. inspectors for destruction.

"We still continue to believe that the Assad regime can and must begin to take the necessary steps, including the packaging and destruction of certain materials on the site to demonstrate it is determined to fulfill its obligation," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will fly to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel next week for talks that are expected to focus on Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war, officials said Friday.

"This trip will be the secretary's third to the Middle East in just over a year, and it will advance America's regional strategy in that region," Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby told a news conference.

Suspected al-Qaida militants attacked Yemen's presidential palace Friday, killing five guards and triggering a fierce gunfight as the jihadists hit back at an army offensive aimed at crushing them.

President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi was not at the palace in the capital when gunmen attacked a checkpoint manned by guards outside the compound, a security source told Agence France Presse.

Returning to her home in the war-ravaged Homs neighborhood of Hamidiyeh, Huda found nothing where her house once stood but a pile of rubble and a lone cup from her coffee service.

She was among hundreds who were allowed to return Friday to inspect the damage to homes they abandoned two years ago rebels and government troops battled for control of the city.

A senior U.N. aid official accused the Syrian government on Friday of blockading medical supplies from convoys bound for opposition-held areas and called for a fresh international push to end the conflict.

"Medical supplies are being removed from convoys as part of a strategy to deny the wounded medical care. This is an abomination," John Ging, the U.N. director of Syria aid operations, told reporters in Geneva.

Yemeni forces have killed two foreign al-Qaida fighters -- a Saudi and a Dagestani -- and captured two French citizens of Tunisian origin also belonging to the group, state media said Friday.

State news agency Saba, quoting a military source, named one of the jihadists as Timur al-Dagestani, and said he was an explosives expert from Russia's Dagestan.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry believes drawing up the borders of a future Palestinian state and agreeing to security arrangements for Israel will be "essential" if peace talks resume, the top U.S. negotiator has said.

In his most candid public comments since the nine-month negotiations collapsed last month, Martin Indyk described the behind-the-scenes atmosphere between Israelis and Palestinians and voiced hopes the talks would resume soon.