A conservative hopeful for Iran's presidential elections pulled out of the race on Monday, but did not endorse any of the four other conservatives standing in the vote, media reports said.

Ex-parliamentary speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, seen close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was not considered a frontrunner for the June 14 election.

Toppled president Hosni Mubarak's retrial was adjourned until July on Monday after new documents and videos were submitted over his alleged complicity in the killings of protesters during Egypt's 2001 revolution.

The criminal court in Cairo, on a technicality, also ordered the release of his two sons, Alaa and Gamal Mubarak, who have been on trial along with the former leader on corruption charges.

Yemeni forces have arrested six al-Qaida militants, including a local chief, in the southeastern province of Hadramawt, where the army is pressing an offensive against the group, the defence ministry said on Monday.

Security forces captured Omar Ashour, the al-Qaida chief in Ghayl Bawazir, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) east of the port city of Mukalla, along with his son Abdullah in the nearby village of Shaheer, the ministry said on its news website 26sep.net.

A controversial U.N. rights expert called Monday for an international investigation of Israel's treatment of Palestinian prisoners, decrying arbitrary detention, torture and coerced confessions among other alleged abuses.

"The treatment of thousands of Palestinians detained or imprisoned by Israel continues to be extremely worrisome," said Richard Falk, the U.N.'s outspoken expert on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was to return to the region this week for talks with Israelis and Palestinians, has postponed his visit, Israeli media reported on Monday.

According to Israel HaYom, a newspaper considered close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Kerry had been due to arrive on Tuesday, but put off the visit "to give (Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas) more time" to decide whether to drop his insistence on a settlement freeze before returning to negotiations.

Iran's Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant has suffered a malfunction in its main generator, the Islamic Republic's ambassador to Moscow said on Monday.

Mahmoud Reza Sadjadi did not specify the nature of the malfunction or make clear whether it has caused the plant's shutdown, Russia's state Itar-TASS news agency reported.

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri has ruled that the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Nusra Front in Syria should operate as separate entities, according to a letter posted on Al-Jazeera television's website.

ISI leader Sheikh Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had "made a mistake" by announcing a merger between the two radical Islamist groups in the neighbouring Arab states"without consulting us," he said.

Two near-simultaneous car bombs and a suicide attack killed 13 people in a wholesale market north of Baghdad on Monday, the latest in a surge in violence that authorities have struggled to control.

The blasts, which left another 53 people wounded, struck a predominantly Shiite town as fruit and vegetable stall owners were crowding the market, purchasing goods for the day's trading, a police officer and a medic said.

An Indonesian woman died Sunday in a fire lit by workers outside her country's consulate in western Saudi Arabia, where thousands converged seeking to resolve their immigration status, a consular source said.

Some 8,000 Indonesians gathered outside the consulate in Jeddah trying to sort out their papers as illegal foreign workers in the kingdom face a deadline to regularize their position or leave.

Building starts on settler homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank hit a seven-year high in the first quarter of 2013, Israeli watchdog Peace Now said on Sunday.

"Between January 2013 and March 2013, construction of 865 new housing units began," the NGO said in a statement quoting recently released government statistics.