Israeli troops wounded a six-year-old Palestinian boy on Sunday when they opened fire east of the town of Rafah, in southern Gaza, Palestinian medical sources said.

"A six-year-old Palestinian child was wounded by Israeli army gunfire near the Kerem Shalom crossing, east of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, which is where the family lives," emergency services spokesman Adham Abu Selmiya told AFP.

Two "terrorists" were killed as a booby-trapped car they were driving blew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in a suburb of Damascus, Syria's state news agency SANA reported on Sunday.

It said the blast in Yarmouk camp on Saturday, the same day as authorities said 27 people were killed in two suspected car bombings in central Damascus, also damaged parked cars and shattered windows of nearby buildings.

Two gunmen shot dead on Sunday a U.S. citizen who worked at a language school in Yemen's second city of Taez, a security official said.

The assailants rode a motorbike in their attack on the man, who was the deputy director of a Swedish language center in the city, 270 kilometers (173 miles) southwest of Sanaa, the official said on condition of anonymity, adding they fled the scene after the shooting.

Iran, Syria's regional ally, on Saturday condemned deadly bomb blasts that rocked Damascus and blamed them on unnamed countries supplying arms to Syrian rebels, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"The responsibility of such actions lies with those whose agenda is to arm and provoke armed groups," foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said in a statement.

Egypt's parliament and senate voted on Saturday for a panel tasked with drafting the country's new constitution to include 50 percent lawmakers from the Islamist-dominated parliament.

In a joint session, both houses of parliament were discussing the criteria for choosing the members of the 100-strong constituent assembly that will write a new charter.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the White House Saturday to demand that the United States "stop the massacre in Syria," where an estimated 8,000 people have been killed in a regime crackdown.

Wearing T-shirts declaring "I have a dream of a free Syria" and "No longer afraid," the demonstrators -- who numbered 4,000, according to organizers -- were marking the first anniversary of a bloody revolt against President Bashar Assad's regime.

Bulgaria on Saturday urged all its nationals to "immediately" leave Syria due to the worsening security situation in the violence-wracked country after a year of unrest.

"The foreign ministry calls on all Bulgarian citizens in Syria to immediately leave the country," the foreign ministry said.

Al-Qaida's front group in Iraq has claimed a suicide car bombing at a Baghdad police academy a month ago that killed 15 people and wounded 21 others, a U.S. monitoring group said on Saturday.

The February 19 bombing was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in weeks, and was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in a statement posted on a jihadist forum on Friday, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist websites.

Pope Shenuda III, who died on Saturday aged 88, was a fearless champion of Egypt's Coptic Christians ready to defy the country's Muslim government, but he also took a more conciliatory tone in his final years.

An increasingly frail Shenuda, who rarely appeared in public, was faced in recent years with a spike in attacks against the Coptic community which he led for more than four decades.

Iraq's deputy foreign minister voiced support on Saturday for the idea of peacekeeping forces manned exclusively by Arab League troops but stopped short of backing a Qatari proposal to deploy one in Syria.

Labid Abbawi's remarks come ahead of an Arab summit due in Baghdad on March 29, the first meeting of the 22-nation bloc in the Iraqi capital since the late dictator Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.