An Israeli soldier implicated in the killing of two Gaza women carrying a white flag faces a 45-day jail term under a plea bargain approved by a military court on Sunday, local media said.

The sniper, identified by Israeli media as "staff sergeant S," was charged with manslaughter in 2010 over the fatal shooting of an unnamed individual, which Palestinian witnesses linked to the killing of 64-year-old Riyeh Abu Hajaj and her daughter Majda Abu Hajaj, 37, during Israel's "Cast Lead" Gaza offensive.

Bahrain said Sunday it has reinstated its ambassador in Iran, more than a year after recalling the envoy over Tehran's strong condemnation of Manama's brutal crackdown on Shiite-led protests.

"The ambassador of the kingdom to the Islamic Republic of Iran has returned to his work in Tehran," announced Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa on his Twitter page.

Gaza's Hamas rulers on Sunday insisted that so far, there was no proof that any Palestinian was involved in a deadly attack on Egyptian troops in northern Sinai which left 16 dead.

"Until now, neither the Palestinian nor the Egyptian security services have proof that any party in Gaza supported or executed the attack," said senior Hamas official Salah al-Bardawil.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the network of smuggling tunnels between Hamas-run Gaza and Egypt as a "threat" to security and lauded Cairo's campaign to seal them.

Speaking a week after a deadly attack which killed 16 Egyptian border police in northern Sinai, Tayeb Abdelrahim, chief of staff to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, expressed full support for Egyptian moves.

A Swiss woman being held hostage in eastern Yemen has made a second video appeal to the Swiss government to help her, the Sonntags Zeitung reported Sunday.

The Swiss Foreign Ministry confirmed the existence of the video but would give no further information to protect the woman's security.

Egyptian security forces killed six gunmen in a raid on a village in North Sinai early Sunday, witnesses said, as the military pressed a campaign against Islamist militants in the lawless peninsula.

State television reported three soldiers were killed in the exchange of fire, but security officials told AFP they had died in a road accident elsewhere in Sinai some five hours before the raid.

Alireza Haidaree has been up all night carefully directing the spade of his bulldozer through the rubble of mud-brick homes in a desperate search for survivors from the deadly quakes that rocked northwestern Iran.

"This village is a mass grave," he says, his hollow voice betraying his exhaustion and his frustration at not finding more people alive.

Twin bombings and a shooting in and around Baghdad on Sunday killed five people, including three Iraqi policemen, security and medical officials said.

In the predominantly Sunni town of Jurf al-Sakhr, 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of the capital, an initial roadside bomb blast at 10:00 am (0700 GMT) killed three policemen, a police major and a medic at the main hospital in provincial capital Hilla said. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.

Arab foreign ministers postponed a planned meeting on the Syrian conflict that had been due to take place in Saudi Arabia later on Sunday, a top Arab League official said.

Ministers had been due to meet in in the Red Sea city of Jeddah to mull their next moves on the Syrian conflict after the resignation of U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan earlier this month, as well as who might succeed him.

The Syrian army pressed its assault on rebels in commercial capital Aleppo on Sunday, while both sides reported atrocities and Arab foreign ministers postponed a planned meeting on the 17-month conflict.

The exiled opposition said that pro-government militia had summarily executed 10 civilians in a round-up in the flashpoint central city of Homs, while the official SANA news agency reported the murder of one of its staff, the latest in a series pro-government journalists to be killed.