Saudi Arabia has hit out at a Russian official for his remarks on unrest in the kingdom's east, saying his comments were a "blatant interference" in its internal affairs, a report said.

It accused Konstantin Dolgov, Russian Foreign Ministry's commissioner for human rights, of diverting attention from the "massacres" that were being committed by Moscow's ally, Damascus, in Syria.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Saturday appealed to China's foreign minister to use his "influence" to help bring pressure on Syria's President Bashar Assad to end conflict, a U.N. spokesman said.

China is a key player in a U.N. Security Council dispute over sanctions against the Syrian leader. It has backed Russia in rejecting western demands for international action to press Assad.

The United Nations may have to curtail humanitarian operations in Syria unless new funds are raised at a key donors' meeting on Monday, officials warned.

U.N. agencies will this month step up their food aid to reach 850,000 people in the conflict-stricken country even though it has only received promises for one fifth of a $189 million appeal.

Bahrain announced on Saturday that it had deported U.S. filmmaker Jen Marlowe, accusing her of falsifying her visa application and shooting a documentary without permission.

Marlowe, a Seattle-based documentary filmmaker who arrived in the country around a week ago, told immigration officials that she had come "to help a friend who had recently had a baby," the information affairs authority said.

An eleven-storey building collapsed in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria on Saturday, destroying three neighboring homes and injuring at least 16 people, police said.

Witnesses said the building housed four families and a bakery, but could not give an overall number of tenants.

The mother of Mohammed Bouazizi, the street vendor whose self-immolation sparked a mass uprising in Tunisia that touched off the Arab Spring, has been remanded in custody for insulting an official, the justice ministry said on Saturday.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday branded the massacre of 150 people in a central Syrian village as "attempted genocide" and said the regime was doomed.

"There is nothing more to be said about Syria," he said, speaking of the bloodshed in the village of Treimsa in Hama province, which activists said was bombarded by government forces.

A French staff member of the International Committee of the Red Cross who was kidnapped in Yemen in April has been released in good health, the ICRC said Saturday.

Benjamin Malbrancke was abducted by gunmen on April 21 while on his way to the airport in the port city of Hudaida in Yemen's north. The two drivers with him were also captured at the time but freed shortly after.

Nawaf Fares, who this week defected as Syria's ambassador to Iraq, on Saturday accused President Bashar Assad of allowing al-Qaida to use Syria as a springboard for attacks in his former host country.

Fares, the latest high-level official to abandon Assad, in an interview on Al-Jazeera television also accused Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of taking a stance toward Syria that was "contradictory" to the truth.

Israel was still holding five foreign women activists on Saturday who were arrested in the West Bank after a demonstration a day earlier, a police spokeswoman said.

"Five European activists arrested Friday during a demonstration in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) remain in detention," Luba Samri told Agence France Presse.