An air raid on a town partly held by rebels on the outskirts of Damascus on Wednesday killed at least 12 members of the same family, most of them children, a watchdog said.

Regime warplanes bombed the town of Moadamiyet al-Sham, southwest of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

An Australian citizen fighting with Syrian rebels in their battle against President Bashar Assad's regime has been killed in the northwest of the country, a watchdog said on Wednesday.

"Abu al-Walid al-Australi was killed December 30 in a rebel assault on the Wadi Deif base," Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Agence France Presse.

The militant Islamic Hamas could wrest the West Bank from the western-backed rule of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, just as it did in the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

"Everyone knows that Hamas could take over the Palestinian Authority," a statement from Netanyahu's office quoted him as telling members of a Jewish bible study circle meeting at his Jerusalem residence.

Algerian troops killed seven armed Islamists early Tuesday in a raid in the Boumerdes region east of the capital during which they also seized arms and ammunition, the defense ministry said.

The operation targeted members of a "dangerous" group in the Boulezazen region of Boumerdes some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Algiers, the ministry said in a statement carried by the APS news agency.

Israeli troops wounded dozens of Palestinians in clashes in a West Bank village on Tuesday after the discovery of a small commando force disguised as Arabs brought a crowd of stone-throwing villagers onto the streets, Palestinians said.

Palestinian security sources told AFP 30 people in Tamoun village were lightly injured by rubber bullets and one was moderately wounded when a live round hit his hand, while dozens more suffered from tear gas inhalation.

A group of some 20 Syrian soldiers including a general defected from the army Tuesday and fled to Turkey, joining hundreds of other ex-troops from Syria's military, a Turkish diplomat told Agence France Presse.

"The soldiers who fled to Turkey include a general, three colonels and several other officers," the source said on condition of anonymity.

Iraqi premier Nuri al-Maliki looked to head off protests in Sunni areas of the country on Tuesday with a prisoner release even as he threatened to use state resources to "intervene" to end the rallies.

The move came as powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr voiced support for the demonstrations and predicted an impending "Iraqi spring" as ongoing rallies blocked off a key trade route connecting Iraq to Syria and Jordan for a 10th successive day.

The Gaza branch of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party has started celebrations of its 48th anniversary in the Hamas-ruled territory, a local leader said on Tuesday.

"Yesterday we lit the light starting the anniversary of the revolution," Atef Abu Seif told AFP.

Suspected Jewish extremists have torched a vehicle in a West Bank village and scrawled racist graffiti on a nearby wall, Palestinians and Israelis said Tuesday.

The pickup truck was totally destroyed, and a tractor belonging to the same owner was damaged by flames in the incident at Beit Ummar village, north of the city Hebron.

Egyptian prosecutors were interrogating on Tuesday an Israeli man in the Red Sea port of Nuweiba who is suspected of espionage, a judicial source said.

"An Israel man was arrested on Monday in Taba on suspicion of espionage. He was remanded today in police custody for four days pending investigation," the source said.