More than 70 Palestinian olive trees were uprooted overnight near the northern West Bank city of Nablus in an attack blamed on Jewish settlers, local officials and an Agence France Presse journalist said.

Residents of Qaryut village 15 kilometers south of Nablus blamed the attack on settlers from the neighboring settlement of Eli.

A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb near a compound of the Syrian intelligence on the outskirts of Damascus on Monday, a Syrian official said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the blast in Harasta, a suburb of the nation's capital, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi on Monday pardoned all those arrested between the start of the revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and June this year, state media said.

A decree published on the presidency's official Facebook page announced the amnesty for deeds "committed with the aim of supporting the revolution and bringing about its objectives, in the period January 25, 2011 to June 30, 2012, with the exception of crimes of first-degree murder."

Yemeni security forces on Monday detained a man believed to be an American who appeared on a list of wanted al-Qaida suspects, a security official told Agence France Presse.

The suspect was detained in Ataq, the capital of Shabwa province, a jihadist stronghold in the south of Yemen, the official said.

Abdel Basset Sayda, the head of the main opposition Syrian National Council, entered the country on Monday for the first time since assuming his post in June, rebel sources said.

Sayda paid a visit to the town of Bab al-Hawa in the northwestern province of Idlib, on the border with Turkey, where he met several leaders of the rebel Free Syrian Army, the sources said.

Violence across Syria has killed more than 32,000 people, most of them civilians, since the outbreak of an anti-regime revolt in March last year, a monitoring group said.

Some 1,000 people have been killed in the past week alone, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, as violence escalates across the country.

Israel has deployed Patriot anti-missile batteries near the northern port city of Haifa, Israeli media reported Monday, just two days after an unidentified drone infiltrated the country's airspace.

A military spokeswoman confirmed to Agence France Presse that the U.S.-made missiles, which can shoot down drones, had been stationed near Haifa but refused to confirm the move was related to the Saturday infiltration.

Syrian rebels holding dozens of Iranian hostages since August and who threatened to execute them by Sunday have temporarily postponed their killing, a Free Syrian Army spokesman told Agence France Presse.

"Contact has been established with the Turkish authorities as part of indirect negotiations between the FSA and the Syrian and Iranian regimes," said Ahmed al-Khatib, spokesman for the FSA's Military Council in Damascus province.

Police said unknown assailants on Monday threw stones, bottles and garbage at the door of a church in Jerusalem, in the third attack against Christian sites in Israel in recent weeks.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence France Presse nobody was injured in the attack on the Romanian Orthodox church, St. George's, but that the door was damaged. Police were investigating, she added.

Barack Obama has "failed to lead" in the Middle East and the strained ties between his White House and Israel have emboldened Iran, presidential challenger Mitt Romney declared Monday.

In a major foreign policy speech, Romney warned the president's dithering had increased instability in a region clamoring for U.S. leadership and left both the United States and its Middle East allies less safe than they were.