Israeli troops shot and seriously wounded a 12-year-old Palestinian boy during a clash in the West Bank on Tuesday, Palestinian security and medical officials told Agence France Presse.

They said that Atta Mohammed Sharadeh was hit during one of what have become almost daily clashes between young Palestinians and soldiers outside the Jelazoun refugee camp, near Ramallah.

Veteran Algerian dissident Hocine Ait Ahmed is too ill to attend a congress of his Socialist Forces Front (FFS) later this week, the first he has missed since he founded it 50 years ago, organizers said on Tuesday.

Ait Ahmed's doctors have advised him against travelling to Algeria for the congress from his longtime base in Switzerland, organizing committee co-chairman Mohamed Amokrane Cherifi told Agence France Presse.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been transferred to a new facility in Paris to continue his recovery after treatment in a French military hospital, France's defense ministry said Tuesday.

Bouteflika, 76, was flown to the Val de Grace hospital in Paris three weeks ago following a mini-stroke and speculation has been rife about the state of his health.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered a shakeup of senior security officers on Tuesday after a spate of unrest that has killed more than 380 people so far this month, an official said.

Maliki, "after consultation with security officials, issues orders ... for changes in the operations commands and commanders of divisions," the senior official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

Syrian opposition representatives have demanded international guarantees that President Bashar Assad step down in any peace deal, former opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib said on Tuesday, as Russia and the United States step up efforts to organize a peace conference.

The demand was one of eight points set out in a roadmap agreed by delegates to a two-day Syrian National Consultation meeting in Madrid, Khatib said on his Facebook page.

An Abu Dhabi court will announce on July 2 its verdict in the trial of dozens of Emirati Islamists accused of plotting to seize power in the Gulf country, state news agency WAM reported Tuesday.

A total of 94 dissidents, eight of whom are tried in absentia, are on trial on charges of forming an organization with an aim to seize power.

Israel's Shin Bet domestic spy agency said on Tuesday it had foiled planned attacks on Israelis by two Palestinian Islamist groups in the Hebron area.

It said that, in March, Shin Bet, army and police uncovered a nine-man Hamas cell in the village of Bani Naim, south of the West Bank city, which planned to shoot dead an Israeli settler working in nearby fields.

Thousands gathered in Yemen's main southern city of Aden on Tuesday to call for renewed independence for the south 23 years after it united with the north.

Waving the flag of the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and portraits of exiled southern leader Ali Salem al-Baid, the protesters gathered at a square in the Khor Maksar district of Aden, Agence France Presse reported.

A planned Syria peace conference next month will only work if the government and rebels send credible negotiating teams, the U.N.'s deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson said Tuesday.

"There have to be two, credible delegations to negotiate," Eliasson told reporters in Geneva, the planned venue of the talks.

Egyptian troops and policemen began sweeps of north Sinai on Tuesday ahead of a possible showdown with heavily armed gunmen who abducted seven security personnel, officials said.

A senior interior ministry official told Agence France Presse a "campaign has been going on for half an hour", while a policeman taking part in the operation told AFP that security forces traded fire with gunmen in a village in the restive peninsula.