U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry came under further attack Monday by Israeli hawks who accuse him of manipulating the threat of an economic boycott to pressure Israel into peace concessions.

The latest war of words between the two allies erupted Saturday after Kerry warned that Israel was facing a growing campaign of delegitimization which would likely worsen if peace talks with the Palestinians collapsed.

A series of attacks in and around Baghdad, including a spate of car bombings, killed 17 people Monday as Iraqi forces pressed an assault against militant-held areas of Anbar province.

The latest bloodshed comes amid a surge in violence that left more than 1,000 people dead in January, the worst such figure in nearly six years, as security forces grapple with near-daily attacks and protracted battles with anti-government fighters.

Gunmen on Monday kidnapped a European oil employee in Sanaa, hours after Yemen's capital was rocked by overnight explosions, in the second abduction of a Westerner in four days.

The renewed violence comes as the government struggles to end fighting between Shiite Huthis and powerful tribesmen in the north, and seeks to turn the Arab republic into a federation.

Saudi authorities on Monday beheaded a citizen in the eastern city of Qatif after he was convicted of killing a compatriot, the interior ministry said.

Ali al-Faraj shot dead Khaled al-Baden during a dispute, the ministry said in a statement published by the official SPA news agency.

Israel has offered Turkey $20 million in compensation to the families of those killed and wounded in its botched 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Haaretz newspaper reported on Monday.

Citing unnamed Western diplomats briefed on ongoing negotiations with Ankara, the daily said Turkey had yet to respond to the Israeli offer.

Al-Qaida has disavowed the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose members have been locked in deadly clashes with Syrian rebels, according to a statement posted on jihadist websites.

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had already ordered the group in May 2013 to disband and return to Iraq, and announced that another jihadist group, the Al-Nusra Front, was al-Qaida's official branch in war-torn Syria.

At least 16 Syrian rebels were killed on Sunday in a double bomb attack carried out by the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an NGO said.

Another 20 rebels were injured in the attack, some of them seriously, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A mortar shell was fired overnight in the direction of the French embassy in Yemen, while a car bomb exploded meters away in Sanaa's diplomatic quarter, a police source said Monday.

"The two attacks happened after midnight. There were no victims," the source said.

The bodies of five presumed migrants thought to have been trying to reach Spain were found on Sunday on northern Morocco's shoreline, local authorities said.

"The bodies of five probably illegal migrants, four of them from Senegal, were washed up from the Mediterranean" in the Nador area, MAP news agency cited officials as saying.

Egypt said Sunday that verdicts handed down by military courts, which under the new constitution are allowed to try civilians, can now be appealed.

The provision allowing civilians to be judged by the military has faced stiff opposition from rights activists.