An Egyptian police officer and six recruits were wounded on Friday when gunmen attacked their patrol in the Sinai Peninsula, security officials said.

The patrol had been tasked with protecting the cross-Sinai pipeline that supplies Egyptian gas to Israel and Jordan and which has been the target of 15 separate attacks since 2011.

Rached Ghannouchi, who heads Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, warned on Friday, three days ahead of the revolution's second anniversary, against the country sliding into chaos amid social unrest.

"Several countries have succeeded in ousting regimes but not then installing a democratic state because liberties become corrupted, as in Somalia," the Ennahda chief told a gathering of supporters in the capital's Raoued suburb.

U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on Friday expressed the urgent need to end the Syrian conflict after meeting with top U.S. and Russian officials, but reported no concrete advances towards a solution.

"We all stressed the need for a speedy end to the bloodshed and the destruction and all forms of violence in Syria," Brahimi told reporters in Geneva, following more than five hours of talks with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.

Israeli army gunfire killed one Palestinian and wounded another in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, a spokesman for the territory's emergency services said.

The two men, one of them a 20-year-old farmer, were hit by live fire east of Jabaliya and near the Israeli border, Ashraf al-Qudra said.

At least a dozen inmates, including several prisoners linked to al-Qaida who have been sentenced to death, escaped from a jail north of Baghdad early on Friday, security officials said.

Sources mooted the possibility of collusion on the part of prison guards in allowing the jailbreak, which occurred shortly after midnight in the town of Taji, 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the capital.

Despite severe wintry conditions, thousands of Syrians gathered across the country for Friday demonstrations denouncing the "death camps", an allusion to the suffering of refugees living in tent settlements in neighboring countries, which this week were hit by snowstorms and floods.

The U.N. said that 612,134 Syrians had been registered as refugees in the region or were in the process of being registered, a sharp rise from the 509,550 announced on December 11.

With just 11 left before voting day, one in four Israelis are still unsure about who to back in the January 22 general elections for the country's 19th Knesset, a survey showed on Friday.

According the results of a poll in the Maariv newspaper, only two thirds of respondents -- 67 percent -- knew how they were going to vote, while 25 percent said they were undecided.

Thousands of Sunni Muslims took to the streets of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq on Friday to decry the alleged targeting of their minority, in rallies hardening opposition to the country's Shiite leader.

The protests have worsened a political crisis, pitting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki against his erstwhile government partners, with the premier facing accusations of authoritarianism and sectarianism ahead of key provincial polls.

The U.N.'s human rights body on Friday said it was 'deeply' dismayed by Saudi Arabi's beheading of a Sri Lankan maid convicted of murdering her employer's baby.

"We express our deep dismay at the execution," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.

Around 200 olive trees in a northern West Bank village were discovered vandalized on Friday, with residents blaming settlers from a nearby outpost for the damage.

According to Palestinian security officials and residents of Qusra, residents of the nearby Esh Kodesh outpost were behind the destruction.