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.

A town on the Turkey-Syria border was quiet Friday after Syrian shells killed five civilians there prompting military retaliation from Turkey.

The Turkish military has amassed tanks and anti-aircraft missiles in the town of Akcakale, following the deadly incident on Wednesday.

A U.S. national opened fire at a hotel in the southern Israeli resort town of Eilat on the Red Sea on Friday, killing a hotel employee, before being shot dead by the security forces, Israeli police said.

The shooting, which took place in the Leonardo Club hotel, occurred as the southern beach resort was packed with tourists and Israelis enjoying the week-long Jewish holiday of Sukkot, or Feast of Tabernacles.

Warplanes pounded rebel-held areas of Homs in the Syrian city's heaviest onslaught for months on Friday, monitors said, as Turkey reportedly returned cross-border shellfire for the second time this week.

The clashes came as the U.N. condemned the Syrian army's deadly shelling of a Turkish border town on Wednesday, and "terrorist" car bombs that killed almost 50 people in the war-torn country's second city Aleppo on the same day.

Libya's national assembly rejected on Thursday the government line-up put forward by new Prime Minister Mustafa Abu Shagur after protesters stormed its headquarters, a representative told AFP.

"We voted to reject the government proposed by Abu Shagur and to grant him until Sunday to present a new line-up," said Abdelali al-Dersi, who represents the eastern town of Al-Bayda in the assembly.

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip crashed into southern Israel on Monday night, without causing casualties or damage, an Israeli military spokesman said.

"The rocket landed in the Ashkelon area without causing any casualties or damage," the spokesman told Agence France Presse.

The United States said Thursday Turkey had taken "appropriate" and "proportional" action in firing back at Syria after a deadly cross-border shelling, but urged that tensions should not escalate.

"From our perspective, the response that Turkey made was appropriate," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, adding Ankara had long made it clear that it would respond to any violation of its territory.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday his country has no intention of going to war with Syria, hours after the parliament in Ankara authorized possible cross-border attacks, as Damascus said it was not seeking "escalation."

"We have no intention of starting a war with Syria," Erdogan said at a press conference amid anger over Syrian shelling that killed five Turkish nationals in a town that borders Syria.

More than 100 angry Libyans stormed the General National Congress on Thursday, protesting over the lack of representation of a western town in a proposed new cabinet line-up.

The demonstrators, who were unarmed, barged their way into the GNC to air their grievances to representatives of the legislative assembly, the first elected authority after four decades under slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi, witnesses said.