Malaysia on Monday defended its deportation of a Saudi journalist wanted at home for comments deemed insulting to the Prophet Mohammed, saying it was not a "safe haven" for fugitives.

"Do not look at Malaysia as a safe transit country or a safe haven for those who are wanted by their country of origin," Malaysian Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference.

Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Sunday supported a Palestinian request for an international peace conference aimed at reaching a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a statement after talks, they stressed "the importance of holding an international peace conference on the Palestinian issue."

Security forces in Bahrain used tear gas on Sunday against hundreds of protesters trying to approach Manama's former Pearl Square, the focal point of a month of Shiite-led protests last year, witnesses told Agence France Presse.

Several small groups of demonstrators numbering several hundred people tried to march from Shiite neighborhoods around the capital to the square ahead of Tuesday's first anniversary of the outbreak of the 2011 protests.

Israeli police used tear gas and rubber bullets against stone-throwing Palestinians in the Issawiya district of annexed east Jerusalem on Sunday, Israeli police and an Agence France Presse journalist said.

"Five Palestinians were arrested after attacking a police and border guard patrol with stones," police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

A commission tasked with drafting a new Syrian constitution submitted a draft charter to President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, the official SANA news agency reported.

"Assad on Sunday received a copy of the new draft constitution from the head of the national committee charged with drafting a new constitution for the Syrian Arab Republic," SANA said.

Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Sunday warned the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas against any "compromise" in its fight against Tehran's nemesis Israel, his official website reported.

"Always be wary of infiltration by the compromisers in a resistance organization, which will gradually weaken it," Khamenei told the visiting Hamas Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniya, according to the leader.ir website.

Jordan's powerful Muslim Brotherhood on Sunday called for "jihad" against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and support for a rebel army, saying it is "an Islamic duty."

"This duty requires all Muslims to support the (rebel) Free Syrian Army against the aggression of the regime's criminal and brutal forces," Brotherhood leader Hammam Saeed was quoted as saying in a statement on the group's website.

The Arab League said it agreed on Sunday to open contacts with Syria's opposition and to ask the United Nations to form a joint peacekeeping force to the unrest-swept country in moves swiftly rejected by Syria.

Arab diplomats "will open channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and offer full political and financial support, urging (the opposition) to unify its ranks," it said in a statement obtained by Agence France Presse.

Al-Qaida's Yemen branch, strongly active in the south of the impoverished nation, executed two of its members on Sunday accusing them of spying on its operations, witnesses said.

The pair were accused of planting tracking devices in the vehicles of fellow al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula militants and of providing Yemeni authorities, and the Saudi and U.S. intelligence services, with information.

Pope Benedict XVI has called on the Syrian leadership to respond urgently to the "legitimate" demands of its people who have been facing an increasingly bloody crackdown by President Bashar Assad's regime.

Benedict called for all sides, but especially Syria's political leaders, to enter into talks to end the uprising.