The United States said Thursday it had sent a "strong message" to the Gulf region, as tensions rise with Iran, by signing a $29.4 billion deal to provide F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia.

The deal, which was signed over the weekend, will supply 84 new Boeing F-15SA aircraft and modernize 70 existing planes and include munitions, spare parts, training and maintenance contracts, U.S. officials said.

A criminal court in Cairo on Thursday acquitted five police officers who had been charged in connection with the deaths of protesters during the popular uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

The officers had been accused of killing six demonstrators near a police station in the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood of central Cairo, a judicial source said.

U.S. officials suspect that Yemen fed them false intelligence for a 2010 strike against al-Qaida suspects that killed a local leader locked in a dispute with the president's family, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The disclosure of such an incident would complicate relations between the two allies at a time when Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is seeking to visit the United States amid months of popular protests demanding his ouster.

The Bahraini authorities announced on Thursday that five police officers accused over the death by torture of two detainees, linked to anti-regime protests earlier this year, would face trial next month.

Public Prosecutor Nawaf Abdullah Hamza was quoted by the official Bahrain News Agency as saying that after examining allegations by the interior ministry of cases of torture and ill treatment, his office had decided to refer one case to the criminal court.

China on Thursday expressed its support for Arab monitors in protest-hit Syria, after France charged the team had not been allowed to see what was happening in a flashpoint town.

China is a key Syrian ally, and along with Russia has used its veto on the U.N. Security Council to block a Western-backed resolution condemning Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Egyptian police raided more than a dozen offices belonging to local and foreign rights groups on Thursday, as part of an investigation into alleged illicit foreign funding, an official statement said, drawing sharp criticism from Washington.

At least two U.S. rights groups -- the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) -- are being targeted by the operation, judicial sources said.

Regime forces fired on protesters at a protest hub near Damascus and killed at least 39 people around Syria on Thursday, even as peace monitors spread out across the country, activists said.

Fourteen people were shot dead in several restive Damascus suburbs, 10 in the central flashpoint province of Homs, 13 in the central province of Hama and two in the northwestern province of Idlib, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

The head of Israel's Mossad spy agency has said a nuclear Iran might not pose an "existential threat" to the Jewish state, in remarks reported Thursday by Haaretz newspaper.

"Does Iran pose a threat to Israel? Absolutely," the daily quoted Mossad chief Tamir Pardo as telling a group of Israeli ambassadors.

Yemen's army killed six suspected al-Qaida militants in a Katyusha rocket attack on their hideout in the restive southern city of Zinjibar, an official said on Thursday.

"The army carried out heavy shelling using Katyusha rockets on a house in Zinjibar's east where al-Qaida militants were gathered to plot attacks on army units... killing six," said the official in the adjacent town of Jaar.

Palestinian militants fired a rocket at southern Israel on Thursday morning, hours after Israeli warplanes attacked "terror sites" inside the Gaza Strip, the army said.

"A rocket fired from Gaza exploded in an open field in the Eshkol region," a military spokesman told Agence France Presse.