Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis supporting self-rule for the formerly independent south rallied in its former capital Aden on Sunday, Agence France Presse reported.

Waving People's Democratic Republic of Yemen flags and photographs of former vice president Ali Salem al-Baid, demonstrators gathered in Aden's Khor Maksar square.

Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Sunday agreed to form a delegation to visit Arab capitals and ask for help in easing the Palestinian financial crisis, the pan-Arab body said.

The delegation will comprise Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi as well as the foreign ministers of Iraq and Lebanon.

Israel's defense ministry has published plans for 170 new housing units and another 84 guest rooms in the West Bank settlement of Rotem in the Jordan Valley, anti-settlement activists said on Sunday.

The settlement itself previously received government approval, but no building plan was set out, according to Hagit Ofran of the Peace Now organization.

The mausoleum in Sidi Bou Said, a prime Tunisian tourism destination, has been ravaged by fire in what is thought to have been an arson attack which the presidency on Sunday denounced as a criminal act.

"This crime against our culture and history must not go unpunished," a presidency statement said, urging police to "spare no efforts in arresting the criminals" who set alight the mausoleum on the outskirts of Tunis on Saturday.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, 92, the spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was discharged from hospital on Sunday morning, a day after a colleague said he suffered a mild stroke.

Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein-Kerem hospital confirmed that the former chief rabbi of Israel had been released but refused to comment on his condition.

Tunisian soldiers were deployed on Sunday in a town near the border with Libya after a week of clashes between police and residents protesting over social inequalities, Agence France Presse reported.

Units from the army and national guard were sent a day before Monday's second anniversary of the Tunisian revolt that began the Arab Spring, sparked by unemployment and tough living conditions.

Saudi Arabia on Sunday criticized world reaction to its beheading a Sri Lankan maid convicted of killing her employer's baby, the official SPA news agency SPA reported.

Riyadh "deplores the statements made... over the execution of a Sri Lankan maid who had plotted and killed an infant by suffocating him to death, one week after she arrived in the kingdom," the government spokesman said.

Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi on Sunday condemned as "a vile act of terrorism" a gun attack on Italy's consul to Benghazi in eastern Libya from which the diplomat escaped unscathed.

"This was an attempt to destabilize the institutions of the new Libya," Terzi also said in a statement after consul Guido De Sanctis's bullet-proof car came under fire on Saturday.

Egypt's Court of Cassation on Sunday accepted an appeal against the life sentence handed down to former president Hosni Mubarak for his involvement in the deaths of protesters in 2011 and ordered a retrial.

Mubarak, his two sons Alaa and Gamal, his former interior minister and top security chiefs will now face a new trial, the court said after a very brief hearing.

Official media in Syria renewed attacks on U.N. and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on Sunday, calling him biased and saying his peace mission aimed at solving the country's crisis was "useless."

On Wednesday, Brahimi criticized as "one-sided" a proposal by President Bashar Assad to end the crisis, and two days later he met top U.S. and Russian officials and urged "a speedy end to the bloodshed" in the strife-torn country.