Palestinian leaders on Friday drew on the legacy of Nelson Mandela, a high-profile supporter of their cause, likening his fight against apartheid to their own struggle to end Israeli occupation.

Tributes to the late South African leader, whose death was announced Thursday, flooded in from Palestinian leaders.

Germany said Friday it was temporarily reducing its embassy staff in Yemen and told its aid workers to leave after an attack claimed by al-Qaida killed 52 people, including two Germans.

All German employees of government-funded aid and development organizations must leave Yemen "as quickly as possible", a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters.

A Jordanian TV reporter who was held for 18 months by Islamic militants in the Philippines said on Friday his ordeal would be added to a book he is writing on global 'hotspots'.

Al-Arabiya reporter Bakr Atyani, who walked free from the hands of the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf group on Wednesday, also said he hoped to return to the Philippines despite his harrowing experience.

Gunmen shot dead a magazine editor investigating corruption in the autonomous Kurdistan region, the latest in a series of attacks on journalists in Iraq, media rights groups and police said Friday.

Kawa Ahmed Germyani, the editor-in-chief of Rayal magazine and a correspondent for Awene newspaper, was gunned down on Thursday night, said Rahman Ghareeb, an official from Kurdish media rights watchdog Metro Center.

Egyptian police arrested dozens of Islamist protesters on Friday when they dispersed rallies across the country, the interior ministry said.

Riot police fired tear gas at separate protests in Cairo and clashed with Islamists in other provinces, amid a campaign to stamp out unrest following president Mohammed Morsi's overthrow in July.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Friday that Syrian President Bashar Assad must stand down to allow for any peaceful settlement to the 33-month-old conflict in his country.

"We have always been very clear that a peaceful solution in Syria must require the departure of President Assad," Hague told a press conference in Kuwait's capital after talks with his Kuwaiti counterpart Sheikh Sabah Khaled al-Sabah.

A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle outside a pro-government militia headquarters in northeastern Syria, killing at least five people on Friday, a monitoring group said.

Another 10 people were wounded in the bombing outside the the National Defense Forces base in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli on the Turkish border, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told Agence France Presse.

The widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat pledged Friday to challenge a French inquiry which found his death to have been from natural causes, rather than poison as Palestinians suspect.

"A request for further expert opinion will be submitted in the next few days to investigating judges in (the Paris suburb of) Nanterre," Suha Arafat's French lawyer Pierre-Olivier Sur told Agence France Presse.

An Italian court on Friday convicted on terror charges an Egyptian cleric who was kidnapped by the CIA in Milan in 2003 and said he was tortured in captivity.

The court sentenced the ex-imam, Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, to six years in prison for criminal association for international terror.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to take inspiration from Nelson Mandela in peace talks, as he wrapped up another visit to the region Friday.

Kerry said Israel and the Palestinians were closer to peace than they have been in years, even though the direct negotiations he brokered have made little visible headway since they began in late July.