Egyptian police on Thursday arrested the Cairo bureau chief of an Iranian news station and a former Islamist lawmaker, security officials said.

Ahmed Fahim Abdel Azim al-Suifi, the Egyptian head of the Cairo office of Iran's Arab-language station Al-Alam, was arrested in an apartment with ex-senate member Essam Ismail Farrag, the officials said.

Israel warned Thursday against a proposal to ease sanctions on Iran in return for the freezing of its nuclear program, saying it would be "a mistake of historic proportions."

"Israel understands that there are proposals on the table in Geneva today" which would "allow Iran to retain the capabilities to make nuclear weapons," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a Jerusalem conference.

Tunisian lawyers on Thursday said the weapon used to kill a prominent opposition MP came from the interior ministry, which they said was concealing a probe into the assassination.

The interior ministry rejected the accusation and condemned what it called "a systematic smear campaign" targeting the security apparatus.

The diplomatic ruckus between Morocco and Algeria over human rights in Western Sahara has revived the historic animosity between North Africa's arch rivals, as regional changes challenge a decades-old status quo.

Analysts say key factors explaining the rising tensions between the neighboring countries, whose differences are rooted in the Western Sahara conflict, include chronic instability in the Sahel region, and a possible leadership change in Algeria next year.

Turkish riot police fired tear gas and water cannon at thousands of demonstrators who were protesting Thursday over the building of a controversial wall on the border with Syria, witnesses said.

Police took action to disperse a large crowd of people who threw Molotov cocktails and plastic bottles at officers in the border town of Nusaybin in the Kurdish-majority southeast, they said.

Israeli security forces on Thursday shut down two east Jerusalem offices they said were a cover for activities of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

A statement from Israel's Shin Bet internal security service said its agents and police closed "two Jerusalem offices, from which the Hamas terror organisation had been conducting actions."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday he has made "significant progress" in marathon talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders amid fears Israeli settlements could derail the peace process.

Kerry pledged that he "absolutely" believed a final agreement on all the most difficult issues could be reached but he did not rule out the possibility of first striking an interim deal.

Tests on the remains of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have neither confirmed nor ruled out polonium as a cause of death, but indicate a third party was involved, Swiss experts said Thursday.

"We can't say that polonium was the source of his death... nor can we rule it out," said Professor Francois Bochud of the Lausanne Institute of Applied Radiophysics, adding that the amount of polonium in Arafat's remains indicate third party involvement.

Attacks in Iraq, including a car bomb targeting Shiite Muslims, killed 11 people on Thursday, officials said, just a week ahead of a major annual Shiite pilgrimage.

The violence follows the start of the Islamic new year and as Shiite Muslims converge on the shrine city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, for commemoration ceremonies.

Washington has contacted several of its allies, including Belgium and France, for possible help in destroying Syria's chemical arsenal, a Belgian foreign ministry spokesman said Thursday.

"The Americans held an exploratory working brief in early October with Belgium, Norway, France and Albania to see what capacities each might have to treat chemical weapons," the spokesman told AFP.