The Palestinian government in the West Bank on Wednesday urged Arab nations to deliver on pledges to supply the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority (PA) with $100 million a month.

Already mired in a financial crisis, the PA has suffered further with Israel's decision to withhold the transfer of tax and tariff funds it collects on behalf of the Palestinians in the wake of their successful bid for enhanced U.N. status.

Jordan's elections commission on Wednesday approved an electoral list that was initially forbidden from registering under the name "Saddam Hussein," after the group agreed to change its title, state media said.

"The list has been accepted after it changed its name to the 'Nation's Honor.' Now we have 61 approved lists" for legislative elections this month, commission spokesman Hussein Bani Hani told the official news agency Petra.

More than 60,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, the U.N. said on Wednesday, as dozens more died or were injured when a service station near Damascus was hit by an air strike.

As the casualties continued to mount, the family of a freelance U.S. journalist, who contributed videos to AFP, revealed that he was kidnapped in Syria six weeks ago and has been missing ever since.

Jordanian riot police fired tear gas on Wednesday to disperse Syrian refugees at a northern desert camp after they clashed over blankets distributed by a local charity, an official and a witness said.

"The Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization was giving away 2,000 blankets at the Zaatari camp. Some refugees tried to grab more blankets, angering other Syrians and clashes broke out," Anmar Hmud, a government spokesman for refugee affairs, told Agence France Presse.

Around 500 Bedouin Palestinians were temporarily evacuated from their homes in the Jordan Valley on Wednesday as the Israeli army carried out exercises, residents and the army said.

An AFP photographer at the scene saw dozens of people being evacuated in the Wadi al-Maleh area in the north of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.

A freelance American reporter who contributed videos to Agence France-Presse (AFP) in recent months was kidnapped in war-torn Syria six weeks ago and has been missing since, his family revealed Wednesday.

U.S. journalist James Foley, 39, an experienced war reporter who has covered other conflicts, was seized by armed men in the northern province of Idlib on November 22, according to witnesses.

Five people were killed in a string of attacks across Iraq on Wednesday, authorities said.

Police officials said that in the first attack, gunmen early Wednesday fatally shot a policeman and his brother who is a member of anti-al-Qaida group north of Baghdad.

Libya has dropped arrest warrants and travel bans slapped by the toppled regime of Moammar Gadhafi against the slain dictator's opponents, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP on Wednesday.

"All arrest warrants and travel bans issued by the former regime against Gadhafi's opponents have been lifted," Mejdi al-Orfi said.

Butcher Sherzad Saleh stands outside his shop in Tuz Khurmatu holding a dead chicken. He has more pressing concerns than a high-level dispute over territory.

"The army comes here, this is my job; the peshmerga come here, this is my job," says Saleh.

Two Jordanian peacekeepers have been freed after 136 days of captivity in Sudan's Darfur region, the African Union-U.N. mission to the troubled region said on Wednesday.

"They are safe," UNAMID spokeswoman Aicha Elbasri told Agence France Presse. "This is the longest hostage-taking incident (for UNAMID)."