The commander of Syrian armed rebels said on Tuesday he was dissatisfied with Arab monitors’ progress in halting a military crackdown on protests and threatened to wait only a few days before escalating operations with a new style of attack.

The Arab League has called for an emergency meeting to discuss whether to withdraw its monitors from Syria in the wake of reports that security forces are still killing anti-government protesters despite the observers’ presence.

Parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi slammed the human rights situation in Iraq on Monday, arguing that “massive” violations were destroying its democracy just as it grapples with a festering political row.

A human rights organisation said that occupation authorities intensified arrest campaigns against Palestinian activists in 2011, especially after the release of prisoners in a prisoner exchange deal about three months ago.

An Arab League observer has said he saw snipers in the Syrian city of Deraa, as protests against President Bashar al-Assad erupted across the country on Friday.  

A hard-won Arab observer mission was headed to Syria’s third largest city Homs on Tuesday following reports that scores of people had been killed in 24 hours in and around the hub of anti-government protests.

Egypt’s two leading Islamist parties won about two-thirds of votes for party lists in the second round of polling for a parliament that will help draft a new constitution after decades of autocratic rule, the election committee said on Saturday.

The Hamas department of refugee affairs urged Palestinian premier Ismail Haneyya to work on forming an Arab army to liberate the occupied Islamic city of Jerusalem from occupation.

Known as a bastion of secularism in the Arab world, a new film about one of thousands of religious schools in Syria shows a rise of religiosity in the conservative society.

An Arab League official on Tuesday said that an advance team will travel to Syria on Thursday to prepare for a mission of 500 observers that the Syrian government agreed to this week. The mission is tasked with ensuring the regime’s compliance with an Arab plan for ending the nation’s political violence.