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.

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.