Gunmen in Baghdad and near Iraq's main northern city killed four people on Wednesday, officials said, the latest in a spate of violence that has broken a relative calm in the country.

The attacks come after violence, claimed by al-Qaida's front group in Iraq, during the recent four-day Eid al-Adha holiday killed 44 people and left more than 150 wounded.

The Arab world will be "relieved" if Israel strikes at Iranian nuclear installations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published Wednesday by France's Paris-Match weekly.

He said in case of an attack, "five minutes later, contrary to what skeptics think, I believe there will be a great feeling of relief throughout the region," said Netanyahu, who on Wednesday began a key two-day visit to France.

A motorcycle bomb attack on Wednesday near a Shiite Muslim shrine southeast of Damascus killed at least eight people and injured dozens, a watchdog said.

State television confirmed the blast, but said that six people had died and 13 were injured.

The Syrian regime has transformed a military airport in Hama city into one of the country's most-feared prisons, where detainees are crammed into hangars and deadly torture is rife, activists, watchdogs and former inmates say.

Known as the site of a 1982 uprising which was crushed amid tens of thousands of deaths by President Bashar Assad's father and predecessor Hafez, Hama has also suffered in Syria's current uprising.

A fire sparked by celebratory gunfire has killed at least 25 people at a wedding in Saudi Arabia, media reported on Wednesday.

The bullets struck electric decorations that triggered a short-circuit, igniting a women-only marquee at the wedding on Tuesday night in Eastern Province, said Al-Yaoum newspaper, citing civil defense chief General Abdullah Khsheiman.

More than 36,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of Syria's anti-regime revolt in March 2011, with an average of 165 people killed a day since August 1, a watchdog said Wednesday.

Civilians, at 25,667, represented the vast majority of those killed, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which includes non-military people who have taken up arms against President Bashar Assad's regime in the category.

Warplanes pummeled rebel positions across the eastern suburbs of Damascus on Wednesday, after a day of clashes and air strikes killed at least 182 people in Syria, a watchdog said.

"Warplanes carried out five air raids on the farmlands around the towns of Saqba and Douma and smoke was seen rising from the targeted areas" east of Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A Kuwaiti opposition figure said he has been summoned for questioning after allegedly criticizing the emir on television, as the Gulf state widened a crackdown on dissent.

"I will go to the public prosecution (on Wednesday) for interrogation on the accusation of undermining the status of the emir in a televised interview in August," former Islamist MP Faisal al-Muslim said on Twitter.

U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said Wednesday he hoped China would play an active role in helping end the violence in Syria as he met Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi for talks in Beijing.

Greeting Yang at the foreign ministry in front of reporters, Brahimi said he hoped "China can play an active role in solving the events in Syria" without elaborating further.

A dozen demonstrators stormed Libya's national assembly late on Tuesday prompting postponement of a key vote on the cabinet line-up proposed by Prime Minister Ali Zeidan.

Images aired on state television showed angry scenes in the chamber as assembly members prepared to vote one by one on the proposed line-up.