Egypt's security forces seized 20 Grad rockets being smuggled in from the Gaza Strip through a tunnel by militants in northern Sinai, security officials said Friday.

The rockets, along with their launch pads, were seized late Thursday after a firefight between security forces and militants in the town of Rafah bordering the Palestinian enclave, they said.

A group of 34 charities and other non-governmental organizations signed a statement Friday urging an end to the deadly conflict between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The statement was signed by groups including ActionAid, CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children and urged the international community to step up efforts to find a lasting solution to disputes in the region.

Benjamin Netanyahu, initially accused by Israel's most ardent hawks of dithering over Hamas rocket fire, appears to have found at least a temporary political balance with his punishing air campaign against Gaza.

But rivals on the far-right are still snapping at him, some demanding that he strangle the densely populated and impoverished Palestinian enclave by cutting off electricity, fuel and food, and others insisting he send in troops and reoccupy it.

The population of Syria's coastal provinces, relatively untouched by the country's war, has shot up by 50 percent, sheltering one million displaced people, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday.

"Over a million people have arrived in Latakia and Tartus since the beginning of the conflict, swelling the local population by 50 percent," the ICRC said in a statement.

Tunisian police fired tear gas overnight to disperse protesters demanding the release of suspected members of an Al-Qaida-linked group arrested in the restive Sidi Bouzid region, the government said Friday.

Eight people were detained in a "sweeping security operation" in the central province, targeting radical Islamists belonging to the banned Ansar al-Sharia group and wanted by the authorities, the interior ministry said Thursday.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest religious authority for Iraq's Shiite majority, urged politicians Friday to stop quarreling and avoid further delays in picking a new leadership.

In a sermon delivered by his representative in the holy Shiite city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, Sistani reiterated his appeal for Iraq's fractious politicians to unite in the face of a jihadist-led offensive that has plunged the country into its worst crisis in years.

Iraq battled a militant assault on key city Ramadi Friday while accusing the Kurds of seizing oil fields, further dashing hopes of political unity to save the country from its feared break-up.

The militant push to take Anbar's provincial capital comes two days before a planned parliamentary session meant to revive flagging efforts to replace the caretaker government in power since April elections.

Iraq accused Kurdish peshmerga fighters of seizing two key northern oil fields near the disputed city of Kirkuk Friday, as relations between Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdistan region hit a new low.

"The oil ministry strongly condemns the seizure and control of crude oil (wells) in the Kirkuk and Bey Hassan oil fields this morning by groups of Kurdish peshmerga forces," the ministry said in a statement.

Israel could be violating the laws of war by bombing Palestinian homes in Gaza, the U.N.'s human rights office said Friday, as the death toll from the Israeli strikes rose to 100.

"We have received disturbing reports that many of the civilian casualties, including of children, occurred as a result of strikes on homes," said spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani.

Blackwater guards fired dozens of shots into cars and people, an FBI expert testified Thursday, in an example of the brutality of the 2007 killings that left 14 Iraqis dead in Baghdad.

Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten appeared dressed in suits and ties before a federal court in Washington as the second trial in the case entered its fifth week.