President Bashar al-Assad said on Saturday the emergency law in force in Syria for nearly 50 years will be abolished within a week, and expressed his sadness at the deaths of protesters.

"The juridical commission on the emergency law has prepared a series of proposals for new legislation, and these proposals will be submitted to the government, which will issue a new law within a week at the most," he said.

The Hamas government said Saturday it has arrested two more suspects in connection with the murder of an Italian activist, hanged hours after his abduction.

The interior ministry "managed to arrest two suspects" in the murder on Friday of pro-Palestinian activist Vittorio Arrigoni, in addition to two other suspects previously taken into custody, a statement said.

An Egyptian court dissolved the former ruling National Democratic Party on Saturday and ordered its funds and property to be handed to the government, a judicial source said.

"The administrative court issued a ruling to dissolve the NDP and seize its money, and its headquarters and buildings will be handed to the government," the source said.

Hamas on Saturday rejected accusations by President Mahmud Abbas that it was blocking Palestinian reconciliation efforts with support from Iran.

"The accusations made Abbas that Hamas receives Iranian instructions to block (inter-Palestinian) reconciliation efforts are not true because it is he who is blocking the reconciliation," Hamas MP Yahiya Musa said.

Jordanian security forces have arrested 70 Islamists after violent protests in which many people were hurt, most of them policemen, a security official told Agence France Presse on Saturday.

The suspects, members of the ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Salafist movement, were rounded up during raids Friday in the town of Zarqa and nearby Rassifeh, hours after Islamist protesters attacked police, the official said.

A Syrian policeman was killed as protests demanding freedoms and reform snowballed a month after they started in one of the Middle East's most autocratic countries, state media reported Saturday.

Despite pledges of reform by President Bashar al-Assad who unveiled a new government on Thursday, protests on Friday gripped several cities and towns across Syria, namely in the northeast home to the Kurdish minority.

Gaza was in shock and mourning Friday after a radical Islamist group killed an Italian activist hours after kidnapping him in an act deplored by Rome as "barbaric."

Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, who was working with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), was found dead by the security forces in a house in northern Gaza early on Friday.

Israeli warplanes launched raids against targets in Gaza overnight after two rockets were fired at Israel from the coastal enclave, Palestinian security officials said on Saturday.

No one was hurt in the air attacks which struck bases of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigade, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas which rules Gaza, in Gaza City and east of it, one source said.

Thousands of protesters massed across Syria after weekly Muslim prayers on Friday as a global outcry widened over a deadly crackdown on month-old, anti-regime demonstrations.

Opposition’s mouthpiece Sham News Network reported that several protesters were wounded when “thugs and security forces” opened fire on them in the Latakia neighborhood of Slaibeh.

Human Rights Watch accused Syrian security and intelligence services Thursday of torturing many of the hundreds of protesters detained since anti-government demonstrations began last month.

Lawyers, activists and journalists who have endorsed or promoted the protests have also been detained, the rights group said.