Egypt's prosecution on Wednesday accepted an offer by ousted president Hosni Mubarak and his family to pay back gifts from the country's flagship newspaper worth millions of Egyptian pounds.

Mubarak, his wife Suzanne, his two sons Alaa and Gamal and their wives allegedly accepted gifts from al-Ahram worth 18 million Egyptian pounds (around $2.7 million) between 2006 and 2011.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said on Wednesday that comments on Israel attributed to him before he was elected, slammed as deeply offensive by the United States, were taken out of context.

"The president stressed they were taken from comments on the Israeli aggression against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and stressed the need to put the remarks in the right context," said a statement from the presidency issued after Morsi met U.S. Senator John McCain.

Only the people of Israel can decide who will represent their best interests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday in remarks directed at U.S. President Barack Obama a week before a general election.

"I think everyone knows that the citizens of Israel are the only ones who can decide who will faithfully represent the vital interests of the state," he said.

The U.N.'s World Food Program said Wednesday it would quickly try to distribute aid to an additional one million Syrians after Damascus gave the green light for the body to work with local aid organizations to reach more of those in need.

Until now most of the agency's food aid was delivered through the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which was overstretched and only able to provide help to some 1.5 million Syrians in the war-torn country a month.

Twin car bombs killed at least 22 people in the Syrian city of Idlib on Wednesday as universities nationwide held a day of mourning for 87 people killed in explosions on the student campus in second city Aleppo.

The bombings had the hallmarks of operations staged by the jihadist al-Nusra Front, a rebel group with a strong presence on the ground in northwestern Syria and blacklisted by the United States as a "terrorist" organization.

Hundreds of Iraqi expatriates protested against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki outside the Iraqi embassy in Sanaa on Wednesday, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

"Maliki leave, the Iraqi people don't want you," chanted the protesters, who marched from Sanaa's northern Sittin Avenue to the embassy carrying Iraqi flags.

Iraq has freed around 400 prisoners since Sunni Arabs began anti-government demonstrations last month, and will press on with more releases on a daily basis, a top minister said on Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said that a committee formed in the wake of the protests would accelerate the process of reviewing prisoners' cases and would look to immediately release those who had been proven innocent.

Opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi's son has been handed a suspended six-month prison sentence for anti-regime conduct, Iran's Fars news agency reported on Wednesday quoting an unnamed source.

Iran's "revolutionary court has sentenced Mohammad Hossein Karroubi to a six-month jail term... for disturbing public opinion against the Islamic regime through giving interviews to foreign media," Fars quoted the source as saying.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advanced a "record" number of settlements during its nearly four years in office, a report by the Peace Now watchdog said on Wednesday.

The government's actions "disclose a clear intention to use settlements to systematically undermine and render impossible a realistic, viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," said the Israeli NGO's report.

Turkish jets struck more than 50 Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq where members of the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are based, military sources said Wednesday.

"Sixteen F-16 fighter jets took off from their base in Diyarbakir in the southeast at around 20:00 GMT Tuesday and bombed the (rebel) targets in Qandil mountain in northern Iraq, 90 kilometers from the border," military sources said.