Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan again warned Syria on Friday it would pay a big price for further attacks, two days after a deadly cross-border shelling.

Erdogan reiterated that Turkey does not want war but is ready to act if threatened by the regime of President Bashar Assad, which has been at war with rebels since early last year.

A small group of Syrian Alawites, the same minority sect as President Bashar Assad, urged their community to join the anti-regime revolt in the country, in a statement sent to Agence France Presse on Friday.

"O Alawites all across Syria, enough is enough, so rise in unity against (Assad's) corrupt family whose only goals are treason, money and power," said a statement signed by a new movement calling itself "Free Alawites".

A top cleric on Friday urged Iranians to confront the "economic war" posed by Western sanctions and for authorities to cease internal bickering, days after protests erupted in Tehran over a collapse in Iran's currency.

"The pressure today imposed on us by the world arrogance (the United States) is full-fledged economic war," Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said at the weekly Muslim prayers in Tehran broadcast by state media.

Tunisian police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters in Sidi Bouzid who were demanding the governor's resignation, Agence France Presse reported.

Around 1,000 people gathered in the central Tunisian town, the birthplace of the uprising that toppled former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali last year, accusing the governor of "incompetence" and calling for him to go.

President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi has accused Iran of backing a faction of Yemen's southern separatist movement seeking to secede by force of arms, a newspaper reported on Friday.

"In the south, there are two movements: a peaceful one and another, which is not," the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat quoted him as saying.

A leader of the Muslim community in the Israeli town of Ramle was found dead in a mosque on Friday under suspicious circumstances, police said.

"A body was discovered, which was later identified as that of Mohammed Taji, aged around 80," police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.

Israeli police entered the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City on Friday after being stoned by worshipers, following several days of clashes there, Israeli police and witnesses said.

"Several hundred worshippers threw stones at police who were stationed at the Mughrabi Gate, forcing them to go onto the plaza and push them towards the middle," police spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence France Presse.

Thousands of Islamists demonstrated in central Amman to demand reforms on Friday, just hours after King Abdullah II dissolved parliament and called early polls without any major political change.

"We demand constitutional reform before the people revolt. The people want to reform the regime," they chanted in the demonstration held outside Al-Husseini mosque in downtown Amman.

An a-Qaida front group, the Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks that cost 33 lives, in a website statement posted on Friday.

"The targets were government, security and army centers" and Shiites as well as Sunni "traitors," it said on jihadist website Honein.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi traveled to the Sinai peninsula on Friday to meet with Coptic families who fled from the town of Rafah after receiving death threats, his Facebook page said.

Morsi was to meet Coptic Christian families "to reassure them," his official page on the social networking site said, as state television broadcast images of him attending Friday prayers at a mosque in North Sinai's capital El-Arish.