Kurdish fighters have agreed to join forces in a standoff with hundreds of Islamist rebels in northeastern Syria, an activist opposed to President President Bashar Assad said on Friday.

Hundreds of fighters loyal to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) -- which has close ties to Turkey's rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) -- have been locked in fierce battles with fighters of the jihadist Al-Nusra Front and allied Ghuraba al-Sham group in Ras al-Ain on the border with Turkey.

Iran's influential parliament speaker Ali Larijani met Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Friday to discuss a solution to the conflict in his country's key ally, reports said.

The meeting came as Moscow warned Turkey against deploying Patriot missiles on its troubled border with war-torn Syria after Ankara turned to NATO to request the surface-to-air defenses.

Russia on Friday warned any deployment of Patriot missiles by Turkey on its border with Syria may create a temptation to use the weapons and spark a "very serious armed conflict" involving NATO.

"I understand that no one has any intention to see NATO get sucked into the Syrian crisis," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters, reiterating concerns aired by the foreign ministry on Thursday.

A Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces near the Gaza border on Friday, the first casualty since the two sides agreed a truce ending their week-long conflict, Palestinian medical sources said.

An Israeli army spokeswoman could not confirm the incident, saying only that "disturbances" had broken out on the Palestinian side of the Gaza border early on Friday, prompting Israeli soldiers to fire warning shots.

Protesters torched Muslim Brotherhood offices on Friday, state media said, as supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi staged rival rallies across Egypt a day after he assumed sweeping powers.

The offices of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, were set ablaze in the canal cities of Ismailiya and Port Said, state television said.

China can play a "special role" in the Middle East, a Palestinian envoy said Friday, following eight days of deadly conflict between Israel and militants in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Bassam al-Salhi, a representative of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, was speaking after talks in Beijing on efforts to upgrade his people's status at the United Nations and maintain calm in the region.

A poll shows about half of Israelis think their government should have continued its military offensive against Palestinian militants in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The independent Maagar Mohot poll released on Friday shows 49 percent of respondents feel Israel should have kept going after squads who fire rockets into Israel. Thirty-one percent supported the government's decision to stop. Twenty percent had no opinion.

A Syrian state television journalist was shot dead in the capital on Wednesday, the latest in a string of employees of pro-government media to be killed, the official SANA news agency reported.

"An armed terrorist group assassinated journalist at the Public Authority for Radio and Television, Basel Tawfiq Yousef, in the Tadamun neighborhood of Damascus," the news agency said.

Seated in a plush Vienna hotel, Rafik Schami is half a world away from the unrest tearing Syria apart. But that doesn't stop the author caring and worrying deeply about the country he fled 41 years ago.

Even in the best-case scenario, the award-winning Schami told Agence France Presse in an interview, creating a democratic Syria once "dictator" Bashar Assad has gone will take at least a decade of "sweat and tears,"

Gaza's streets, empty and quiet during a week of violence, were once again flooded with cars and people on Thursday as life returned to normal after a truce deal between Hamas and Israel.

The contrast between the deserted roads of the past eight days, and the scenes of joyful chaos on Gaza City's thoroughfares on Thursday was almost comical.