Rebels bogged down in Syria's former commercial hub of Aleppo are waging an assault on regime forces defending its international airport, seeing it as the key to seizing the whole city.

"If the airport falls, all of Aleppo will fall," said Colonel Abu Kosai, one of the rebel commanders of the multi-pronged operation against the regime base on the airport's periphery.

Fierce clashes raged on Friday in the majority Kurdish northern Syrian city of Ras al-Ain on the Turkish border, a day after a sniper killed a French journalist in embattled Aleppo.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed Yves Debay's death on Friday, after Aleppo-based activists accused regime troops of the shooting, and distributed photographs of his body and press card.

The toll from a spate of attacks across Iraq on Thursday rose to 29 dead and 120 wounded, officials said, amid weeks of anti-government protests and a political crisis engulfing the country.

The attacks marked the third consecutive day of violence that claimed 88 lives overall, including that of a Sunni Iraqi MP killed by a suicide bomber and 33 others who died in twin car bombs in an ethnically mixed northern city.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Friday that there would be no dismantlement of any Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank if he wins a general election next week.

Asked in an interview with the Maariv newspaper: "Can you promise that during the next four years, no settlement will be dismantled?" Netanyahu answered: "Yes."

FBI director Robert Mueller traveled to Libya, his office said Thursday, as U.S. investigators continue their probe there into last year's deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission.

"The director was in Libya to discuss cooperation on several issues," said an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity, without addressing whether Mueller, America's top cop, was investigating the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi.

Iraq will re-open two border points to Jordan and Syria, more than a week after they were shut due to rallies blocking the main route linking Baghdad to the two countries, an official said Thursday.

The Trebil crossing, the only checkpoint linking Iraq to Jordan, and the al-Walid crossing, Iraq's southernmost checkpoint along its border with Syria, will open from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) on Friday, according to Mohammed Fathi, a spokesman for the provincial government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar.

An Islamic group headed by influential cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on Thursday criticized France's "haste" in launching an offensive against Islamists in Mali, warning of "dangerous consequences."

"Military intervention has dangerous consequences, whether in killing, destruction, displacement... and famine, which Mali is already suffering from," the Qatar-based International Union of Muslim Scholars said in a statement.

Slain leader Moammar Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity, appeared for the first time in a Libyan court on Thursday on charges of "undermining state security," a judicial official said.

He was charged after a controversial June visit to Libya by an International Criminal Court team to help prepare his defense against the charges of crimes against humanity in the conflict that overthrew his father.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah and the rival Hamas agreed on Thursday to revive their long-stalled reconciliation accord by the end of this month, the head of Fatah's delegation to talks in Cairo told AFP.

"Fatah and Hamas agreed at a meeting in Cairo on Thursday between delegations of the two movements on a timetable for implementing Palestinian reconciliation," Azzam al-Ahmad said by telephone from the Egyptian capital.

An air raid south of Damascus on Thursday killed at least 11 civilians, among them seven children, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Seven girls, three women and a man were killed in the air strike," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, updating an earlier toll of 10.