Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah opened an annual summit of wealthy Gulf states on Tuesday with a call for an end to the "human catastrophe" in Syria.

Sheikh Sabah, who gave a share of the spotlight at the Gulf Cooperation Council summit to the head of Syria's main opposition bloc, also condemned the United Nations for failing to halt the 33-month conflict.

Iran on Tuesday dismissed an offer from Israel's president to meet his Iranian counterpart as a propaganda ploy to ease Israeli isolation over a nuclear accord between Tehran and world powers.

"This propaganda to help the regime out of isolation will prove fruitless," foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham told reporters.

A diplomatic spat has erupted between Israel and Romania after Bucharest reportedly refused to allow Romanian construction workers to be employed in West Bank settlements, Israel's military radio said Tuesday.

The row comes in the wake of tensions between Israel and the European Union over new guidelines that bar EU funding for any Israeli entity operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Yemeni security forces have defused two booby-trapped vehicles and are searching for five others in Sanaa following a deadly attack on the defense ministry last week, police said Tuesday.

Acting on a tip-off, the security forces launched a major operation to locate and rid the capital of the bombs, and managed to find two of them on Monday, a police official told Agence France Presse.

Four prominent Syrian activists, including one whose work was recognized by the European parliament, were kidnapped Tuesday in a rebel-held area near Damascus by unknown individuals, an activist network said.

"On the morning of December 10th, a group of unknown people broke into the headquarters of a group documenting abuses in Syria in the Douma area in besieged Eastern Ghouta," the Local Coordination Committees said.

A suicide bomber attacked a Shiite shrine in Iraq Tuesday, killing 11 people, including some mourning seven who were shot dead earlier in the day, police and a doctor said.

The blast at the Abu Idris shrine in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad in the religiously and ethnically mixed province of Diyala, also wounded 19 people, the sources said.

Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces have killed some 2,900 people "with knives," the opposition National Coalition said in a new report Tuesday.

The publication, timed to coincide with International Human Rights Day, accuses Syrian government forces of carrying out "at least 20 massacres that involved the slaughter of 2,885 people" with knives and other crude weapons.

A months-long blockade by armed protesters of vital oil terminals in eastern Libya will be lifted on Sunday, allowing exports to resume, a tribal chief announced.

"We expect that the export of crude from the oil terminals will resume from December 15," Saleh al-Ateiwich, head of the powerful al-Magharba tribe which launched the blockade in July in support of its demands for regional autonomy, said Tuesday.

Thirteen Egyptian and international human rights organizations on Tuesday urged Cairo's military-installed authorities to probe the mass killing of Islamist protesters in the capital on August 14.

The joint call issued by organizations that included Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said an investigation must be launched into the killing of "up to 1,000 people by security forces" almost four months ago when they dispersed sit-ins by supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi.

The U.N. said Tuesday it would for the first time begin airlifting food and other aid items across the border from Iraq to Syria after receiving the go-ahead from both governments.

"Our colleagues on the Iraqi side, with the permission of the Syrian government and also the cooperation of the Iraqi government, (are preparing for the) airlifting of supplies for winter from Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan to Qamishli and Hassaka in north and northeast Syria," Amin Awad, who heads the U.N. refugee agency's Syria response, told reporters in Geneva.