The head of Syria's rebel Free Syrian Army visited the coastal province of Latakia, as opposition fighters battled regime forces in President Bashar Assad's heartland, an activist told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Assad's family hails from the coastal region of Latakia, which is also home to many members of the Alawite community he hails from, and has seen intense fighting in recent months.

The leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, vowed Monday that imprisoned members of the terror network would be freed.

In a "letter to the captives in the tyrants' prisons" the head of al-Qaida's Yemeni branch said "the detention (of the network's prisoners) cannot last".

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle met Sunday with Israeli officials on a visit to support nascent peace talks, offering to try to soften a European ban on dealings with Jewish settlements.

"This meeting comes after we relaunched the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and I know that Germany is deeply supportive of the need of direct, bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians," Israeli Justice Minister and chief negotiator Tzipi Livni said ahead of their Jerusalem meeting.

An al-Qaida front group on Sunday claimed a wave of attacks that killed dozens of people during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, as Iraqis angrily blamed authorities for failing to prevent the violence.

The international community roundly condemned the attacks, which killed 74 people and wounded more than 320 people, but almost all senior Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, made no mention of the unrest.

Israel will release 26 veteran Palestinian prisoners ahead of renewed peace talks set for later this week, an official statement said late Sunday.

Following the government decision the Israel Prisons Service published the names of the 26 selected to be freed ahead of the talks.

Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian on the border with Gaza and wounded another, sources on both sides told Agence France Presse on Sunday .

The 30-year-old man, shot east of El-Bureij in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday night, was named as Hussein Awadallah from Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the Palestinian enclave.

Syrian rebel fighters kidnapped 13 Kurds in the northern province of Aleppo on Sunday, turning them over to jihadist fighters already holding 250 abducted Kurds, an NGO said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the 13 were snatched at a roadblock in the Sfeira region of Aleppo and passed them on to al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group affiliated with al-Qaida.

Egyptian air strikes in the Sinai Peninsula killed at least eight militants and destroyed a weapons depot, the military and local residents said on Sunday.

The overnight strikes against "a terrorist group" responsible for killing police and army troops in north Sinai left "25 people dead and injured", army spokesman Colonel Ahmed Aly said.

The head of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party Ennahda is to meet the powerful UGTT trade union chief on Monday on the crisis sparked by the killing of an opposition politician.

The UGTT said that its head, Houcine Abassi, would meet Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi and Mustapha Ben Jaafar, speaker of the National Constituent Assembly.

A number of U.S. diplomatic missions closed on August 4 over an al-Qaida security alert reopened Sunday, while others stayed shut for the Muslim holidays following the Ramadan holy month.

The embassy in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, and the U.S. consulate in Dubai reopened, as the holiday marking the end of the fasting month came to a close in the southern Gulf state.