Some 120 foreign activists were being held in Israeli jails Saturday, awaiting possible deportation, after arriving at Tel Aviv's airport over the weekend as part of a solidarity mission with the Palestinians, a government official said.

Others who managed to get through Israeli border controls traveled to the West Bank where some joined a demonstration against Israel's separation barrier.

A Yemeni army officer and two of his troops were killed in an ambush by gunmen near the southern port city of Aden on Saturday, military sources said.

They said the unidentified assailants opened fire with automatic weapons on a jeep in the village of Thalaet, west of Daleh, killing Lotf al-Mazlum and two soldiers as well as wounding two civilians, witnesses said.

Iran said it fired two medium range missiles into the Indian Ocean six months ago under the eyes of "American spy planes," local media reported on Saturday, quoting a top military commander.

"In Bahman (Iranian month which runs from January 21 to February 19, two Revolutionary Guard missiles with the range of 1,900 kilometers were fired from Semnan (central Iran) to the designated targets in the Indian Ocean," said the unit's aerospace chief, Amir Ali Hajizadeh said.

Egypt on Saturday appointed a new information minister, a controversial post that had been abolished after the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Osama Heikal, former editor-in-chief of the liberal Wafd party's newspaper, was sworn in on Saturday in front of Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the head of the military council that took power when Mubarak was ousted.

Around 2,000 Chadian migrants trapped in war-torn Libya are being flown back to their homeland, the International Organization for Migration said on Saturday.

The group -- mostly women and children -- have been stuck in the southern desert towns of Sabha and Gatroun while trying to flee across the Sahara to Chad.

Security forces killed at least 15 people and arrested more than 200 people in Syria, activists said, as Human Rights Watch denounced on Saturday a "deliberate policy" to disperse protesters with deadly force.

The deaths came as Damascus accused the U.S. envoy of inciting violence in Hama -- where nearly half a million people protested on Friday -- a charge roundly denied by Washington which accused the Syrian embassy of spying on demonstrators in the United States.

Hundreds of protesters spent the night in Cairo's Tahrir Square, an Agence France Presse reporter said on Saturday, after mass nationwide rallies to press the new military rulers to make good on promises of reform.

Dozens of tents were pitched in the square -- the focus of protests that ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak in February -- and traffic was blocked around the usually busy plaza where music blasted from loudspeakers.

Washington summoned the Syrian ambassador for talks this week after reports that embassy staff had filmed U.S. protests against the crackdown in Syria, the State Department said Friday.

Ambassador Imad Mustapha was called in to meet with top State Department officials "to express a number of our concerns with the reported actions of certain Syrian embassy staff in the United States," the agency said.

Embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said in an audio message relayed to supporters on Friday that his regime will not fall and told NATO to stop attacking his troops.

"The regime in Libya will not fall -- it is based on the people, not on Gadhafi. NATO is wrong if it thinks it can topple the regime of this country," he said in the message to thousands of supporters in Sabha, some 750 kilometers south of Tripoli.

Fearing an acute shortage of medical and other essential supplies, Libya's rival factions are in talks with the United Nations to ease international sanctions on the war-torn nation, Agence France Presse has learned.

Well-placed U.N. officials said representatives from Libya's rebel council and Moammar Gadhafi's regime held talks last week with the World Health Organization aimed at drawing up a list of items for sanctions relief.