The key interior and finance ministries look set to change hands in an Egyptian government reshuffle expected to be announced on Sunday, the official MENA news agency reported.

The agency said Saturday it had learned that Finance Minister Mumtaz al-Said, a key point man in talks with the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8-billion loan, will be replaced by economist El-Morsi El-Sayed Hegazy.

Syria's embattled President Bashar Assad is to make a rare speech Sunday as violence rages in a civil war the U.N. says has killed more than 60,000 people and as U.S. missiles are deployed along the Turkish border.

The U.S. military said deployment of Patriot missiles was to help Turkey defend itself against any threat from neighboring Syria which is in the throes of a deadly 21-month civil war.

A six-year-old boy in Gaza died on Saturday and three others were wounded in an explosion in Khan Yunis, Palestinian medical sources said.

The Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis was not able to state what caused the explosion that resulted in the death of Moussa Kawaree.

Faruq Hosni, who was Egypt's culture minister for more than two decades under ousted president Hosni Mubarak, was cleared on Saturday of corruption charges, a judicial source said.

A criminal court in the Giza suburb of Cairo "found Faruq Hosni not guilty on charges of corruption and illegal enrichment," the source said.

Israeli soldiers on Saturday were trying to break up clashes between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the northern West Bank town of Qusra.

Palestinian security sources and eyewitnesses said settlers used the cover of fog to approach the town south of Nablus with the aim of uprooting dozens of olive saplings, but were confronted by farmers who threw stones at them.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is responding well to treatment in Germany after suffering a stroke and has moved on to rehabilitation, his office said in a statement on Saturday.

Talabani, 79, traveled to Berlin last month after what state television reported was a stroke, the latest in a series of health problems he has suffered in recent years.

A Moammar Gadhafi-era security official has been killed in Libya's second city Benghazi, local officials said Saturday, in the latest attack highlighting a lack of security in the east of the country.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Nasser al-Magrabi was found dead on his farm last night," an official in Benghazi's criminal investigations department told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt on Saturday called for a peaceful solution to the conflict roiling Syria, but said the terms of a settlement to end the bloodshed there must be defined by the Syrian people.

"A peaceful solution in Syria is necessary and it is desired by Arab countries and the international community," Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at a joint news conference with his Egyptian counterpart Mohammed Kamel Amr.

The Algerian army has identified one of seven armed Islamists killed east of the capital earlier this month as a key financier of the local affiliate of al-Qaida, the El Watan newspaper reported on Saturday.

Izza Rezki, also known as Abou Djaffar, took up arms against the government in 1994, early in Algeria's devastating civil war, and was a key aide of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) leader Abdelmalek Droukdel, the paper said.

Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi will visit Egypt next week for talks on bilateral ties and the crisis in Syria, the ISNA news agency reported Saturday quoting an Iranian diplomat.

Salehi will meet with his counterpart Mohammed Kamel Amr and President Mohammed Morsi during his two-day visit which begins on January 9, said Mojtaba Amani, the head of Tehran's interests section in Cairo.