Gunmen killed two Iraqi engineers, wounded a third and kidnapped another when they attacked a camp near a gas field run by a South Korean firm in Iraq's western desert, officials said on Tuesday.

The attack on the camp, for workers contracted by KOGAS to work on the Akkaz field, occurred at around 10:00 pm (19:00 GMT) on Monday, according to Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed al-Khafaji, the chief of police in the town of Qaim on the Iraq-Syria border.

Fighting between Syria's rebels and loyalist troops raged in two Damascus neighborhoods on Tuesday while shelling of a village near the capital left four members of a family dead, a watchdog said.

"Fierce battles broke out in the Barzeh district of northern Damascus. Shelling in the area wounded five people and caused material damage," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a broad network of activists, doctors and lawyers for its reporting.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas blamed the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday for the death of a prisoner suffering from terminal cancer.

"The Palestinian presidency holds the government of Netanyahu responsible for the martyrdom of prisoner Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh today in the prisons of the Israeli occupation," Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.

Hamas re-elected its veteran leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo on Monday, an official of the Palestinian Islamist movement said.

"The leaders of Hamas chose Meshaal," the high-ranking official told Agence France Presse via telephone from the Egyptian capital, requesting anonymity.

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad was hospitalized on Monday with stomach pains, but his life was not in any danger, medics in Ramallah said.

Fayyad "suffered from a mild infection of the stomach and is being treated with antibiotics," a doctor at the hospital in the West Bank city told Agence France Presse.

Morocco's military trial and imprisonment of 25 Sahrawis, nine of them for life, violated international law, Human Rights Watch charged on Monday, calling on Rabat to either free or retry the defendants in a civilian court.

The New York-based rights watchdog said the military tribunal rejected defense demands to investigate the allegations by the accused that police had tortured them and forced them to sign statements they had not read.

The United States on Monday voiced concern over freedom of expression in Egypt following the arrest of a comedian for allegedly insulting President Mohamed Morsi and Islam.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the detention and release of television satirist Bassem Youssef was evidence of a "disturbing trend" of mounting restrictions on freedom of expression.

The month of March was the deadliest in Syria's two-year conflict, with more than 6,000 people killed, a monitoring group said on Monday.

"At least 6,005 people were killed in March. A total of 2,080 were civilians, among them 298 children aged under 16. Another 291 fatalities were women," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Canada opened its first diplomatic mission in Iraq in more than two decades on Monday as Foreign Minister John Baird acknowledged his country "needs to be on the ground in Baghdad".

On a brief visit to the Iraqi capital, Baird met with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his political rival Osama al-Nujaifi, the parliament speaker, as well as inaugurated the mission, an office of the Canadian embassy in Amman that will be located on the compound of the British embassy in Baghdad.

Rached Ghannouchi, the head of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, said he backs the application of the death penalty, describing it as a "natural law" in a television interview to be broadcast Monday evening.

"We say that capital punishment is a natural law, a soul for a soul. And whoever threatens the life of another must know that his life is also threatened," the Ennahda party's veteran chief told news channel France 24.