Violence in Syria has killed at least 33,082 people, most of them civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Saturday.

Some 1,000 people have been killed in the past five days alone, the Britain-based watchdog said.

Shootings and bomb attacks in and around Iraq's main northern city on Saturday killed two people, including a soldier, and wounded four others, security and medical officials said.

In a Kurdish-majority neighborhood in the east of Mosul, a civilian was killed in a drive-by shooting, according to Iraqi army Lieutenant Khaled Hamed and doctor Mahmud Haddad at the city's main hospital.

Syrian rebels blocked on Saturday army reinforcements advancing towards the town of Maaret al-Numan which has been under rebel control for nearly a week, an Agence France Presse journalist said.

In its bid to retake the town, strategically located in the northwest on the road from Turkey to the embattled city of Aleppo, the army used warplanes to bombard Maaret al-Numan, killing two civilians and destroying three homes.

The United States believes Iran was behind a major cyberattack on Saudi Arabia's state oil company and a Qatari gas firm, a former U.S. official who has worked on cybersecurity issues said Friday.

In a major cybersecurity speech on Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a veiled warning to Tehran that Washington is ready to take preemptive action to protect U.S. computer networks, the former official said.

The Israeli air force launched attacks at three sites in the Gaza Strip on Saturday morning, the military said, hours after a rocket fired from the enclave exploded near a house in southern Israel.

A statement from the army said that its "aircraft targeted a terror activity site in the northern Gaza Strip, and two terror activity sites in the central Gaza Strip. Direct hits were confirmed."

The army took a pounding at the hands of rebels in northern Syria, a watchdog said on Friday, as tensions between Damascus and Ankara escalated over cargo seized from a Syrian passenger plane.

A rebel offensive killed more than 130 soldiers in two days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi pledged on Friday to bring to justice Mubarak-era officials, a day after his bid to sack the top prosecutor infuriated a judiciary wary of its new Islamist leader.

Morsi reopened a rift with the judges on Thursday after trying to remove the state prosecutor following acquittals of ex-regime men accused of organizing an attack on protesters during last year's uprising against Hosni Mubarak.

The Syrian plane intercepted by Turkey this week on a flight from Moscow was carrying a legal cargo of radar equipment, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.

"This cargo is electrical technical equipment for radar stations, this is dual-purpose equipment but is not forbidden by any international conventions," Lavrov said in the Russian government's first public remarks about the nature of the cargo.

Turkey scrambled a fighter jet on Friday after a Syrian helicopter shelled the Syrian town of Azmarin near their common border, an official told Agence France Presse.

"The fighter jet took off from Diyarbakir base in the southeast after (Syrian) regime forces sent a helicopter to shell Azmarin which was seized by rebel forces," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Supporters of President Mohammed Morsi clashed with opponents in Cairo's Tahrir Square on Friday in the worst violence over Egypt's new Islamist leader, a day after he crossed swords with the judiciary.

Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood movement and a coalition of secular-leaning groups held separate rallies on some of the thorniest issues facing the new democracy after last year's uprising which ousted president Hosni Mubarak.