Iran's nuclear ambitions and Syria's chemical weapons are the real threats facing the world, not Israeli settlement building, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

He made his remarks on a visit to the first Israeli university to be established in a settlement in the occupied territories, in sprawling Ariel in the West Bank.

Five civilians were killed in heavy fighting around a Palestinian refugee camp in the Syrian capital on Tuesday as rebels withdrew from a northwestern town after a night of clashes, a watchdog said.

Meanwhile, Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi renewed a call for opposition figures to enter into a dialogue for peace offered by President Bashar Assad, despite domestic and rebel groups already rejecting the proposal.

Kuwait parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the controversial electoral decree that caused the opposition in the oil-rich Gulf state to boycott the December 1 general elections.

Forty-nine lawmakers voted for the decree issued by Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah in October after he dissolved the previous parliament. Two MPs voted against the decree while three others abstained.

Rebels from the jihadist al-Nusra Front executed three captured soldiers in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Tuesday.

"Al-Nusra Front executed three regime troops who were captured on January 5 from the technical services building in Deir Ezzor city," the watchdog said, adding that it was not clear when, exactly, the soldiers were killed.

Yemeni President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi has ordered forming two panels to resolve lingering grievances of southerners in a new move to get them to join a stalled national dialogue, state media said on Tuesday.

One commission will be to resolve disputes over lands that many southerners claim the previous regime seized from them and the other to handle the cases of civil servants and security officials fired from their jobs, official news agency SANA said.

An Egyptian court on Tuesday acquitted a television show presenter on charges of trying to incite President Mohamed Morsi's murder, a judicial official said.

Tawfiq Okasha, who hosted a show on his Faraeen television station, was put on trial after several people complained to the court that he called on Egyptians to overthrow Morsi and kill him.

Pro-Damascus Palestinian groups in Syria said on Tuesday that Yarmuk camp in the south of the capital must be "demilitarized", and called on Palestinian factions to help refugees who fled camp violence to return home.

Violence has struck several refugee camps since March 2011, when the revolt erupted in Syria, which is home to some 490,000 Palestinians.

Advocacy group Amnesty International has called for the release of an Egyptian journalist facing military trial under a controversial law that allows the army to court-martial civilians.

The army arrested Mohamed Sabry, a freelance video journalist and an activist who opposed military trials, in the eastern Sinai peninsula while he was working on a story for the Reuters news agency, Amnesty International said.

The Ottoman-era palace now serving as their school in the rebel-held part of Aleppo's historic center may have a gracious interior court and high ceilings.

But it's the walls, the solid stone walls, that are the reason the children are taking their classes there.

The foreign policy outlook of U.S. President Barak Obama's nominee for defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, is "cause for concern" for Israel, parliament speaker Reuven Rivlin said on Tuesday.

"This concept of 'splendid isolation' which Hagel espouses changes U.S. strategy in the world and accordingly it also affects Israel," Rivlin said in a statement. "This outlook must give Israel cause for concern but not scare it," said Rivlin, adding it was "important that Israel know how to deal with" such a worldview.