A ceasefire went into effect on Sunday between Syrian pro-government forces and Islamist rebels in three battleground districts, a local official and a monitoring group said.

The truce covers the two remaining villages in Idlib province in the northwest still in government hands and the rebels' last stronghold near the Lebanese border, the town of Zabadani.

Unidentified assailants gunned down an Egyptian police general on the street in the Sinai Peninsula stronghold of the Islamic State group late on Saturday, the interior ministry said.

General Ahmed Abdel Satar was the second senior police officer in three days to be killed in the North Sinai provincial capital El-Arish.

Senior members of Britain's opposition Labor Party are planning to defy their new pacifist leader and vote with the government to carry out air strikes against Islamic State extremists in Syria, the Sunday Times newspaper reported.

The paper said that half of the party's shadow cabinet would side with Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative government in a House of Commons vote it said could be held next month.

Canada's conservative government on Saturday said that it would accept 10,000 Syrian refugees within one year by simplifying and speeding up the immigration application process.

Visa officers will no longer ask the applicants to prove that they are refugees through a United Nations refugee agency, but will instead "presume those fleeing the conflict meet the definition of a refugee, which will make processing faster," the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship said in a statement.

French President Francois Hollande arrived in Morocco Saturday on an official visit that takes place against a backdrop of controversy over torture lawsuits in Paris against the kingdom's intelligence chief.

Hollande, accompanied by five ministers and a delegation of business leaders, was met on the tarmac in Tangiers by King Mohammed VI at the start of the two-day visit.

Al-Qaida's Syria affiliate and its Islamist allies have executed at least 56 regime troops at a military airport they recently seized in the northwest, a monitoring group said Saturday.

Al-Nusra Front and the Islamists shot dead the regime fighters, who were being held as prisoners, "execution-style" inside the Abu Duhur airport, said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi swore in a new government on Saturday that included 16 new ministers, a week after the previous administration resigned following a corruption scandal.

Sharif Ismail, who served as petroleum minister in the last cabinet, was sworn in as prime minister in a ceremony shown on state television.

Twenty rescue operations Saturday picked up over 4,500 people off the Libyan coast, according to the Italian coastguard, which was coordinating the response for yet another boat in distress in the Mediterranean.

Among those taking part was Doctors Without Borders ship Bourbon Argos, which told AFP it had rescued over 800 people, who were expected to be brought to safety in Italy along with the rest of those saved.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must step down, but not necessarily immediately upon reaching a settlement to end the country's civil war.

Speaking after talks in London with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, Kerry said he was prepared to negotiate to achieve a solution but asked whether Assad was.

Air raids by Saudi-led coalition warplanes killed 15 people in Yemen's capital in one of the heaviest nights of bombardment in months, aid workers and witnesses said Saturday.

One rescuer told AFP at least 10 civilians were among the dead.