Saudi Arabia slammed an Israeli air strike that hit targets near Damascus as a "flagrant violation" against the war-torn country's territory, the kingdom's official SPA news agency reported Monday.

The Saudi cabinet "condemns the Israeli aggression against Syrian territories which it considers a flagrant violation against the territories of an Arab state and against its sovereignty," SPA reported.

Syrian warplanes launched a deadly raid Monday on the outskirts of the rebel-held town of Douma northeast of Damascus, killing seven civilians, among them six children, a monitoring group said.

"Seven civilians, among them six children, were killed in an air raid on the Shifuniyeh area near Douma," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A suicide bomber blew himself up near a group of anti-Qaida fighters receiving salaries north of Baghdad on Monday, killing 23 people, the second bloody attack to hit Iraq in as many days.

The blast, which officials said also wounded at least 44 people, came after Baghdad raised the salaries of the mostly-Sunni militiamen in a bid to placate weeks of anti-government demonstrations in predominantly-Sunni areas of Iraq.

An Egyptian activist who slipped into a coma following days in police custody died on Monday, the health ministry and his party said, setting off a storm over police brutality in the new Egypt.

Mohammed al-Guindi, 28, went missing last month after joining protests demanding change on the second anniversary of Egypt's uprising against former president Hosni Mubarak.

Israel will regret its latest "aggression against Syria", Iran's security chief Saeed Jalili told reporters during a visit to Damascus on Monday.

"Just like it regretted all its wars... the Zionist entity will regret its aggression against Syria," Jalili, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said a day after Israel implicitly confirmed it staged an air strike near Damascus last week.

Syrian "extremists" have released two Russians and an Italian citizen kidnapped on December 12 in the west of Syria, as part of an exchange for militants, the Russian foreign ministry said Monday.

The two Russians are already at the Russian embassy in Damascus while the Italian will be handed over to Italy's representatives through the Syrian foreign ministry, it said in a statement, without giving further details on the nature of the exchange.

Tehran has denied that a ship loaded with rockets and explosives intercepted by Yemen's coast guard originated from Iran as claimed by Yemeni officials, local media reported on Monday.

The reports cited an unnamed source in the foreign ministry as saying that Tehran "strongly denies claims" by Yemen that the vessel came from Iran and was loaded with arms destined for Shiite rebels in Sunni-majority Yemen.

Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal Muqdad begins a four-day visit to China on Monday, Beijing's foreign ministry said, after a handful of visits by high-level envoys in recent months.

Syria's opposition offered this week to hold talks with the Damascus government over the country's bloody conflict, now almost two years long.

The army said that "overnight 25 Palestinians were arrested all over the West Bank," but did not provide details.

Sources in Hamas said "20 senior Hamas members were arrested in the West Bank, among them three parliament members." It named them as Hatem Kafisha and Mohammad Al-Tal, arrested in Hebron, and Ahmad Atoun, detained in Ramallah.

Four people were shot dead overnight in Kirkuk, hours after a coordinated assault on a police headquarters in the north Iraq city left 30 people dead, officials said on Monday.

The security and medical officials said that at around midnight a gunman opened fire on four men sitting in a caravan adjacent to a neighborhood electricity generator, killing all of them.