Syrian forces bombarded rebel strongholds around Damascus Monday and rounded up residents in a massive raid in the heart of the capital as fighting raged in the second city of Aleppo, activists said.

Security forces raided houses and shops in the center of Damascus in the biggest operation of its kind in the city since the launch of the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime in March last year, they said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived on Monday in Saudi Arabia ahead of an extraordinary summit in Mecca expected to focus on the Syria conflict, on which Tehran and Riyadh have taken opposing sides.

Ahmadinejad arrived in the Muslim holy city of Medina, in western Saudi Arabia, SPA state news agency said, adding that he visited the mosque and tomb of Islam's Prophet Mohammed.

French military medics started on Sunday to set up a field hospital at Jordan's main camp for Syrian refugees, as residents expressed fear that their stay could turn into a long one.

Refugees gathered to watch 85 French medical officers assemble the hospital of 30 large khaki tents as well as 80 tons of medical equipment and aid supplies at the desert camp outside the city of Mafraq in northern Jordan.

The Syrian army pressed its assault on rebels in commercial capital Aleppo on Sunday, as both sides reported atrocities.

The exiled opposition said pro-government militia had executed 10 civilians in a roundup in the flashpoint central city of Homs, while the official SANA news agency reported the murder of one of its staff, in the latest case of a pro-government journalist being killed.

Egypt's Islamist President Mohammed Morsi on Sunday ordered the surprise retirement of his powerful defense minister and scrapped a constitutional document which handed sweeping powers to the military.

Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who ruled Egypt for more than a year after the revolution that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak, was replaced by Abdel Fattah al-Sissi.

Residents of the northern Syrian city of Aazaz, "liberated" by the rebels three weeks ago, are already living a post Bashar Assad reality with a military and a political council running daily life.

"When the fighting ended, there was nothing. No water, no electricity, nothing to eat," Samir Hajj Omar, head of a new political council in Aazaz which is striving to organize for a post-Assad rule.

An Israeli soldier implicated in the killing of two Gaza women carrying a white flag faces a 45-day jail term under a plea bargain approved by a military court on Sunday, local media said.

The sniper, identified by Israeli media as "staff sergeant S," was charged with manslaughter in 2010 over the fatal shooting of an unnamed individual, which Palestinian witnesses linked to the killing of 64-year-old Riyeh Abu Hajaj and her daughter Majda Abu Hajaj, 37, during Israel's "Cast Lead" Gaza offensive.

Bahrain said Sunday it has reinstated its ambassador in Iran, more than a year after recalling the envoy over Tehran's strong condemnation of Manama's brutal crackdown on Shiite-led protests.

"The ambassador of the kingdom to the Islamic Republic of Iran has returned to his work in Tehran," announced Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa on his Twitter page.

Gaza's Hamas rulers on Sunday insisted that so far, there was no proof that any Palestinian was involved in a deadly attack on Egyptian troops in northern Sinai which left 16 dead.

"Until now, neither the Palestinian nor the Egyptian security services have proof that any party in Gaza supported or executed the attack," said senior Hamas official Salah al-Bardawil.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the network of smuggling tunnels between Hamas-run Gaza and Egypt as a "threat" to security and lauded Cairo's campaign to seal them.

Speaking a week after a deadly attack which killed 16 Egyptian border police in northern Sinai, Tayeb Abdelrahim, chief of staff to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, expressed full support for Egyptian moves.