Dutch pension asset manager PGGM, one of the largest in the country, said on Wednesday it was divesting from five Israeli banks because they finance Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The announcement comes a month after a major Dutch water supplier ended a partnership with an Israeli water company which supplies Israeli towns and Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Several Kuwaiti MPs sharply criticized the cabinet on Wednesday, two days after its formation, saying it will fail to resolve problems in the oil-rich emirate, and urged the premier to quit.

Since early 2006, Kuwait has been in almost continuous political crisis, with a dozen cabinets quitting and parliament dissolved six times.

More than 13,000 families have fled Fallujah in the past few days amid clashes and shelling after the city fell to al-Qaida-linked militants, the Iraqi Red Crescent said on Wednesday.

"Most of them are now living in schools, public buildings or with relatives," Red Crescent official Mohammed al-Khuzaie said in a statement.

Gaza's Hamas government freed seven imprisoned Fatah members Wednesday, as part of efforts to mend relations between the Islamist movement and its West Bank-based Palestinian rival, officials said.

"The release of these condemned men comes as part of the prime minister's decisions to strengthen national reconciliation," Hamas interior ministry spokesman Islam Shahwan told reporters.

More than 10,000 African asylum seekers rallied outside Israel's parliament in Jerusalem Wednesday, police said, in a fourth straight day of protests against immigration policy.

The demonstration was "calm," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP, adding that police were deployed to keep order. He put the number of protesters at "more than 10,000".

Clashes erupted in central Tunisia Wednesday between police and demonstrators as discontent mounts over new taxes and a failure to improve living conditions three years after the revolution.

Dozens of protesters tried to force their way into the offices of the ruling Islamist party Ennahda in the town of Kasserine, but police drove them back with tear gas, an Agence France Presse journalist reported.

Suspected Jewish extremists torched two cars near the West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday, police said, a day after Palestinians beat and detained Israeli settlers in a nearby village.

The vandals also scrawled Hebrew graffiti, including the words "price tag" on a wall in Madameh village, west of Nablus, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.

Ministers from the "Friends of Syria" grouping are to meet in Paris Sunday with leaders of the mainstream opposition to President Bashar Assad ahead of peace talks due later this month.

A French diplomatic source said the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will be present, among others, as will Ahmad Jarba, head of Syria's mainstream opposition National Coalition.

Masked gunmen remained in control of Iraq's Fallujah Wednesday even as traffic police returned to the city's streets after a jihadist group urged Sunnis to keep fighting the Shiite-led government.

Fallujah and parts of the Anbar provincial capital Ramadi farther west have been outside government hands for days -- the first time militants have exercised such open control in major cities since the height of the insurgency that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Syria's exiled opposition has postponed until next week a decision on whether to take part in U.N.-hosted peace talks in Switzerland, following two days of heated debate in Turkey, members said.

The general assembly of the mainstream opposition National Coalition decided to suspend its debate and meet again in Istanbul on January 17, just five days before the peace conference is to open in the the lakeside town of Montreux.