Leading Republican White House contender Newt Gingrich has stood by remarks that Palestinians are an "invented" people, which have sparked outrage as he seemed to call into question long-held U.S. policy on statehood.

"Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes," Gingrich said during a thorny moment in the latest debate among the Republicans vying to challenge President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election.

Egypt's Islamists said on Sunday they would not accept any interference from the ruling military council over the future constitution amid uncertainty about the army's role in the process.

"No one except the elected parliament has the right to draft legislation," Khairat al-Shater, the number two in the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's biggest Islamist movement, said on Twitter.

Syrian anti-regime protesters want to preserve state institutions to avoid repeating the mistakes made in Iraq, opposition leader Burhan Ghalioun said in an interview published on Sunday.

"The opposition is no longer ready to negotiate with murderers," Ghalioun, the head of the Syrian National Council, told Der Spiegel weekly, referring to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Africa to discuss illegal migration from the continent to the Jewish state, he said on Sunday, as his cabinet approved new measures to combat the problem.

Speaking ahead of a cabinet meeting to approve ways to deal with an influx of illegal migrants, Netanyahu announced "I intend to travel to Africa later to discuss and advance procedures for returning them (migrants) to Africa."

Syrian troops battled army defectors Sunday in clashes that left several military vehicles in flames. The fighting and other violence around the nation killed at least 20 people, the Local Coordination Committees said.

Six people were killed in the central province of Hama, another six in the central province of Homs, three in the northwestern province of Idlib, three in the Damascus suburbs of al-Mleiha and Douma, and two in the southern province of Daraa, the Committees said.

Activists called a general strike on Sunday to step up the pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime as fears grew of an "invasion" of the besieged protest hub of Homs.

In a civil disobedience campaign, anti-regime protesters were organizing sit-ins, the closure of shops and universities, and the strike.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki headed to Washington on Sunday, for the first time as the leader of a country virtually empty of foreign troops as the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq nears its final days.

Maliki is to hold wide-ranging talks with U.S. President Barack Obama during his two-day visit, which comes less than a month before the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and more than eight years after the launch of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

A Palestinian father and his daughter were wounded as their home was hit in an Israeli air raid on Gaza City early on Sunday, medics said.

They said the two were wounded in the Zeitun area of Gaza City when a missile struck, apparently targeting a neighboring building.

Tunisia's constituent assembly on Saturday adopted a provisional constitution that will allow the north African country to name a government, a month and a half after its first post-revolution election.

The 217-member assembly approved each of the 26 clauses of the document individually to get state institutions back on the move before voting on the entire basic law.

Israel's new ambassador to Egypt, Yaakov Amitai, is to take up his post in Cairo on Monday, three months after an attack on the mission, a foreign ministry source said.

The source, declining to be named, said Amitai, replacing Yitzhak Levanon who has completed his term as ambassador to Egypt, would present his credentials at a later date.