Palestinian Christians near Bethlehem on Monday urged Pope Francis to speak up against an Israeli decision to build its controversial separation barrier on a route they say would cut off their community.

"We cry to your Holiness with a feeling of despair and urgency in order to keep alive our hope that justice and peace is still possible," said an open letter from the Christians of Beit Jala, a town near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

Influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi said he will lead a delegation of clerics next week on a support visit to Hamas-ruled Gaza, a local daily reported Monday.

Qaradawi, an Egyptian who is also a citizen of Qatar and close to the Muslim Brotherhood, will travel to Gaza on May 8 along with a delegation of the Doha-based International Union of Muslim Scholars, he told Al-Arab daily.

Parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi called on Monday for the cabinet to resign and for early elections to be held, as a seven-day wave of violence killed more than 230 people in Iraq.

The initiative is aimed at "national reconciliation and maintaining the gains of democracy," as well as "sparing the country from the specter of civil war and sectarian strife," Nujaifi's office said in a statement.

Kuwait's court of appeals on Monday reduced a two-year jail term handed to an opposition tweeter for insulting the emir to one year, the director of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights said.

"The court reduced the sentence on Sager al-Hashash to one year in jail with immediate effect," Mohammed al-Humaidi said on his Twitter account.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, hospitalized in France after suffering a mini-stroke, is in good health and will return to Algeria within a week, his doctor was quoted as saying Monday.

"The president is in very good health... He will come back to Algeria in several days... in not more than seven days," Rachid Bougherbal told the Algerian daily Ennahar, after speaking to Bouteflika on Sunday morning.

A Saudi court jailed seven people convicted of supporting al-Qaida to between two and eight years in prison, state news agency SPA reported.

Another defendant was jailed for four months after he was convicted of "attempting suicide several times" in prison, as suicide is forbidden in Islam, and a ninth was acquitted, it said late Sunday.

A United Arab Emirates court on Monday jailed three Britons for four years each on drugs charges, amid calls for their release and claims they have been tortured in prison.

The sentencing of Grant Cameron, Karl Williams and Suneet Jeerth, all 25, came a day ahead of a visit by UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan to Britain, during which the case is expected to be discussed.

Russia on Monday warned the West against using a search for weapons of mass destruction in Syria as an excuse for ousting President Bashar Assad along the lines of the notorious hunt for deadly arms in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov questioned why U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was calling for a fact-finding mission in Syria by citing unproven claims of the regime's use of chemical weapons in December.

The UAE has criticized a report by Washington on the human rights situation in the country as "unbalanced" because it ignores recent improvements, while insisting the Gulf federation is committed to bettering its rights record, state news agency WAM reported.

"The Emirati government takes seriously any fears of alleged human rights violations," WAM late Sunday reported the foreign ministry as saying.

Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi escaped an assassination bid on Monday, surviving a blast that targeted his convoy in Damascus, Syrian state television reported.

"The terrorist explosion in Mazzeh was an attempt to target the prime minister's convoy and Dr. Wael al-Halqi was unharmed," state television reported.