Moroccan security forces seized nearly 24 tonnes of hashish from a number of boats and arrested 11 people after an overnight chase off the northern coast, the MAP news agency reported Saturday.

The operation came hours after Spanish police said they had seized 11 tonnes of hashish and detained 55 people across the country as part of an operation targeting a Moroccan drug trafficking ring.

Thousands of Palestinians marched Saturday in the West Bank in protest over the latest cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed published by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,

Answering calls by the Liberation Party, an Islamist group, demonstrators rallied in the cities of Ramallah and Hebron, some carrying banners expressing faith in Islam and others wearing black headbands calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate, AFP photographers said.

A female demonstrator was killed in clashes with Egyptian police during a rare leftwing protest in central Cairo Saturday, the eve of the anniversary of the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak, an official said.

Shaima al-Sabbagh, who friends said was 34 and the mother of a five-year-old boy, died of birdshot wounds, a health ministry spokesman said.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has vowed that Germany will do all in its power to resolve the fate of the blogger condemned to 1,000 lashes in Saudi Arabia.

"The penalty handed down to Raef Badawi is cruel, bad, unjust and totally disproportionate," Steinmeier said in comments to appear Sunday in the Bild am Sonntag weekly newspaper.

An Egyptian appeals court Saturday ordered a retrial of 152 Islamists, including 37 sentenced to death in a mass trial that had sparked international outrage, judicial officials said.

Last March, a lower court in the southern province of Minya sentenced to death 529 Islamist supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi, including the 152 who were in custody, for attacking a police station and killing an officer in August 2013.

Yemeni armed tribesmen arrived in Sanaa on Saturday in a bid to free top officials sieged by the powerful Shiite Huthi militia, tribal and defense sources said.

Representatives of tribes from Marib and Jawf provinces, joined by tribes from Sanaa, arrived in dozens of vehicles carrying armed men near the house of Defense Minister Mahmud Subaihi, a tribal source said.

A Syrian refugee child has been beaten by a restaurant manager in the Turkish city Istanbul for eating a customer's leftovers, local media reported on Saturday.

A photo circulating on social media shows the 11-year-old boy sitting bloodied on stairs after having been beaten Wednesday by the manager of fast food chain Burger King's outlet in the Sirinevler district.

The head of Libya's Ansar al-Sharia jihadist group, whose fate has been a mystery since fighting in October, was mortally wounded then, Islamist websites and an army officer said Saturday.

Mohamed al-Zehawi "was killed in Benina clashes near the Benghazi airport, southeast of the city," the Islamist militias February 17 Martyrs and Rafallah al-Sahati Brigades said on Facebook.

Syria's opposition factions called Saturday for "radical democratic change" in the war-torn country ahead of April talks aimed at unifying their plan for a political solution to the conflict.

In a two-day conference held in Cairo, the regime-tolerated opposition met with members of the exiled National Coalition and agreed on a 10-point vision, as well as announcing fresh talks slated for April.

The United Nations has accused Israel of illegally demolishing the homes of 77 Palestinians, mostly children, this week in annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

"In the past three days, 77 Palestinians, over half of them children, have been made homeless," the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement issued Friday evening.