A Kuwaiti former oil minister and senior member of the Al-Sabah ruling family, Sheikh Saud Nasser al-Sabah, has died after a long battle with cancer, said the royal court. He was 68.

Sheikh Saud died late on Saturday night in a Kuwaiti hospital, the court said in a statement.

About 200 Palestinians staged a demonstration on Saturday in the West Bank town of Ramallah against the exploratory talks with Israel being held in Jordan.

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators have held three such meetings in Amman this month in a bid to restart direct peace talks which have been on ice since September 2010, but without any concrete results.

Blogger Michael Nabil who was jailed last year for insulting Egypt's armed forces has been granted a pardon, the military judiciary chief said on Saturday.

Adel al-Mursi said the decision to pardon Nabil was taken "on the occasion of the first anniversary of January 25," when the uprising began against former president Hosni Mubarak.

A key Syrian opposition activist has left her homeland and is living in France, an online newspaper reported Saturday.

"I left Syria, in secret, at the request of the revolutionaries," Suhair al-Atassi told the website Mediapart.

Gunmen killed four Iraqi soldiers in an attack in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah west of Baghdad on Saturday, the provincial security command center said.

The attack took place at a checkpoint near a public park in the center of the city, 60 kilometers west of the capital, at around 6:45 pm (15:45 GMT), according to Major Yassin Mohammed in Anbar province operations center.

Opposition Syrian National Council leaders on Saturday pressed the Arab League to turn the Syria crisis over to the U.N., but the League looked set to extend its own mission criticized for its failure to stem 10 months of killing.

SNC chief Burhan Ghaliun met Arab League head Nabil al-Arabi in Cairo and lobbied against the extension of the League's peace mission, SNC spokeswoman Basma Qadmani said.

The rebel Free Syrian Army, whose forces are present in Zabadani northeast of Damascus, fears a government offensive on the city after its forces withdrew several days ago, a spokesman said on Saturday.

Major Maher Nueimi told Agence France Presse by telephone from Turkey that the army had pulled back a few kilometers from the city near the Lebanese border "in what may have been a tactical retreat to prepare an attack."

Egyptian border police shot dead two African migrants and wounded a third as they tried to cross illegally into Israel early Saturday, security officials said.

Border police spotted the man and woman, whose nationality remains unknown, as they tried to climb over barbed wire along the frontier and fired on them after they refused to heed calls to stop.

Angry protesters stormed the offices of Libya's National Transitional Council in the eastern city of Benghazi on Saturday after besieging the building for hours, an NTC member told Agence France Presse.

"The demonstrators attacked the building and turned NTC offices upside down," the official said on condition of anonymity.

The Muslim Brotherhood's party has won 47.18 percent of seats in the Egyptian parliament, the electoral commission announced on Saturday as it gave the final results from marathon polls.

The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) won 235 seats in the new People's Assembly, or 47.18 percent, committee head Abdel Moez Ibrahim said.