Suspected al-Qaida gunmen on a motorbike have shot dead a high-ranking security official in Yemen's Dhammar province, south of Sanaa, the official Saba news agency reported on Thursday.

"Two gunmen on a motorbike opened gunfire on Colonel (Abdullah) al-Mushki killing him immediately," Saba quoted a security official in Dhammar as saying about Wednesday's shooting.

Israeli police overnight dismantled a Palestinian protest camp set up on a controversial piece of land on the outskirts of Jerusalem, a police spokesman and activists said on Thursday.

"The 24 tents in the encampment were dismantled during the night by police. No incidents took place during or after the operation," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse, confirming the site was now empty.

Israel's Supreme Court on Wednesday approved dismantling a Palestinian camp set up on a West Bank site slated for Jewish settlement, three days after its inhabitants had already been evicted.

The court ruling said that the risk of "public disorder" outweighed "arguments of the (Palestinian) petitioners concerning property rights."

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.