Almost 150 people, mostly children, were injured by fireworks in Tripoli set off to celebrate the Prophet Mohammed's birthday, hospital sources said on Thursday.

"On Wednesday night we received more than 120 victims, mostly children, who suffered from burns of varying degrees," news agency LANA quoted Bashir al-Shawess of Tripoli's burns hospital as saying.

Tribal leaders, pro-regime loyalists and independent businessmen swept Jordan's parliamentary election that was shunned by Islamists, according to preliminary results released on Thursday.

Analysts say the new parliament will now be dominated by loyalists who will resist pressure for real political reform.

Archbishop Nurhan Manougian has been elected the 97th Armenian Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, one of the five custodians of Christian religious sites in the Holy Land, sources told AFP on Thursday.

Manougian, 65, replaces Torkom Manougian, who died aged 93 in October 2012, after falling into a coma following a stroke.

The mayor of the Iraqi town where a suicide bomber killed 42 people at a funeral said on Thursday that the attack was launched by a man disguised as a cleric.

The bomber struck Wednesday at a Shiite mosque in Tuz Khurmatu, 175 kilometers (110 miles) north of Baghdad, targeting the funeral of the relative of a politician.

Police clashed with protesters in Cairo Thursday, eve of the the second anniversary of the uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, as they tried to dismantle a security barrier and called for the fall of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, an AFP correspondent said.

A few dozens men and youths tried to dismantle the wall of concrete blocks that blocked a street leading to Tahrir Square, focal point of demonstrations that broke out on January 25, 2010 and led to Mubarak's resignation 18 days later.

A delegation from the U.N. Security Council was due in Sanaa on Sunday to discuss Yemen's bumpy political transition process, Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi told AFP.

The delegation would meet with Yemeni President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi and members of the national consensus government, formed after former strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh agreed to cede power following a year-long uprising in 2011, Qirbi said.

Britain, Germany and the Netherlands urged their citizens on Thursday to immediately leave Benghazi after London warned of a "specific and imminent threat to Westerners" in the eastern Libyan city.

Britain's warning sparked an angry response from Libya's government, which said there was "no new intelligence" to justify such concerns in the city which was the cradle of the uprising that ousted strongman Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

Syria's embattled President Bashar Assad was Thursday shown on state television attending prayers at a mosque in a northern district of Damascus to mark the Prophet Mohammed's birthday.

The leader was shown in a live broadcast kneeling in al-Afram mosque flanked by Syria's Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun, the highest Sunni religious authority in the country, and the religious endowments minister.

Syria is unlikely to see peace in 2013 as the fighting in the strife-torn country edges closer to civil war, Iran's Ambassador to Baghdad Hassan Danaie-Far told AFP on Thursday.

In a grim assessment of nearly two years of conflict in Iraq's western neighbor, Danaie-Far said he believed that not all rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's forces can be called "terrorists," a term broadly used by the Syrian regime for insurgents.

Syrian troops bombarded besieged districts of Homs on Thursday, as clashes raged unabated in the west of the central city for the fifth day a row, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Six rebels were among seven people killed by regime shelling and overnight firefights in the Jobar district, the Britain-based watchdog said.