Egypt's Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi vowed Wednesday to disperse Islamist protest camps in Cairo, after the failure was announced of foreign mediation with supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi.

"The cabinet affirms that the decision to disperse the Rabaa Adawiya and Nahda sit-ins is a final decision, on which all agree, and there is no going back on it," Beblawi said, reading a statement aired on state television.

An Israeli rabbi was on Wednesday found guilty of sexually abusing a minor, public radio said.

A Jerusalem court ruled that influential Zionist rabbi Mordechai Elon had "inappropriately" touched a young boy on two separate occasions in 2005, the radio quoted a lawyer as saying.

Yemeni authorities foiled an al-Qaida plot to seize control of two cities and an oil export terminal and to kidnap foreigners, a government spokesman said on Wednesday.

"The main aim of the plot was to seize control of two cities, Al-Mukalla and Ghayl Bawazeer" in the southeast, Rajeh Badi told Agence France Presse, adding that oil export facilities near Mukalla were also to be targeted.

Gunmen have killed three policemen in an ambush in the eastern Algerian region of Kabylie and lost one of their own, daily newspaper El-Watan reported on Wednesday.

"A police patrol was attacked by a group of terrorists on the road to the new hospital in Azeffoun" on Tuesday afternoon, some 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of the city of Tizi Ouzou, the paper said.

Whole neighborhoods of Syria's second city Aleppo have been flattened over the past year of conflict, with residents bombed from the air and abused on the ground, Amnesty said Tuesday.

"Aleppo has been utterly devastated, its people fleeing the conflagration in huge numbers," said Amnesty International's Senior Crisis Response Adviser Donatella Rovera.

Authorities have foiled a plot by al-Qaida militants to seize a Canadian-run oil terminal in Yemen and then kill or kidnap foreigners working there, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

The Times said the development was the first indication of the nature of an al-Qaida threat that prompted mass closings of U.S. diplomatic missions in the region from Sunday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Iran had expanded its sensitive enrichment of uranium despite the election as president of moderate cleric Hasan Rowhani.

"Iran has not stopped its nuclear program, even after its presidential election" on June 14, Netanyahu said in comments broadcast by public radio.

Saudi Arabia's deputy defense minister has been replaced after only four months in the post by a half-brother of powerful intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in a royal decree.

Prince Salman bin Sultan, son of late crown prince and veteran defence minister Sultan bin Abdul Aziz who died in 2011, replaced Prince Fahd bin Abdullah bin Mohammed who was named deputy defense minister only in April, the official SPA agency reported late Tuesday.

Western and Arab efforts to mediate an end to Egypt's political deadlock have failed, the presidency said Wednesday, signalling a possible crackdown on Islamists that has sparked fears of more carnage.

The statement came hours after U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns left Cairo, having made no headway in finding a compromise between the army-installed government and supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

Al-Qaida in Yemen was Wednesday hit by a fresh strike from a U.S. drone which left seven militants dead, tribal sources said, a day after Washington pulled its diplomats from the country fearing an attack by the jihadists.

The early-morning strike in Yemen's southern Shabwa province destroyed two vehicles, the sources said. Those who died were all members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula(AQAP).