Iranian warships that docked in Saudi Arabia this month were part of a "training tour for students" in the Islamic republic's navy, the state news agency SPA reported on Saturday.

It said officials at Tehran's embassy in Riyadh submitted a request for two ships and a helicopter to dock at Jeddah between February 1 and 7.

Negotiations between the International Committee of the Red Cross, Syrian authorities and opposition groups to evacuate the wounded from Baba Amr in Homs on Saturday ended in failure, the IRCR said.

The "ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent have been negotiating since this morning with both the Syrian authorities and opposition groups in Homs. The discussion has yielded no concrete result today. Unfortunately, therefore, no emergency evacuation will take place today," a spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Bahrain's main opposition formation al-Wefaq said on Saturday that a woman had died from tear gas inhalation, noting that "violations" by the authorities have increased over the past several months.

A woman in her 70s, "Abdat al-Hussein, died because of the excessive use of tear gas by security forces in al-Sahla" region, said the Shiite grouping without giving further details.

Rockets fired from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip slammed into southern Israel on Saturday without causing casualties or damage, a police spokesman said.

"Two rockets were fired and landed in uninhabited areas near the town of Sderot," spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

The people of north Africa's Maghreb region "need and deserve" to determine their own future, U.S. Secretary State Hillary Clinton said in Algeria Saturday, ahead of elections there in May.

Clinton was speaking during a brief visit to the country a day after attending a "Friends of Syria" international gathering in neighboring Tunisia, and hours before flying on to Morocco.

Anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr attacked Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a "dictator" hungry for acclaim, a statement and officials from his movement said on Saturday.

The charge, from a key member of Maliki's unity government, could indicate a new round of political conflict after a tentative improvement in a row pitting Maliki's Shiite-led government against the secular Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc.

Iran reaffirmed Saturday its opposition to any military intervention in Syria, after an international conference suggested sending an Arab force to Tehran's ally to subdue ongoing bloodshed.

Iran "rejects any kind of military intervention in Syrian affairs," a foreign ministry statement said.

More than 3,000 protesters rallied in Tunisia's capital on Saturday to call for the country's moderate Islamist government to resign after accusations that ruling party activists had defaced union offices.

The protesters demonstrated outside the headquarters of the country's main UGTT union, chanting "The people want the government's fall" and "Hands off my UGTT", before marching through the center of Tunis.

A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle outside a presidential palace in southeastern Yemen Saturday, killing 20 elite Republican Guards, under the command of outgoing president Ali Abdullah Saleh's son Ahmed, medics and a military official said.

"The bodies of 20 soldiers were taken to the mortuary and there are many others wounded," said a medic at the Ibn Sina hospital in the Hadramawt provincial capital Mukalla.

United Nations international staff have returned to Sudan's South Kordofan for the first time in months, the U.N. said on Saturday, as global concern mounts over food shortages in the war-torn state.

"Today, FAO and OCHA flew back there by helicopter and they landed safely" in the state capital of Kadugli, Damian Rance, a public information officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP.