An Abu Dhabi court will announce on July 2 its verdict in the trial of dozens of Emirati Islamists accused of plotting to seize power in the Gulf country, state news agency WAM reported Tuesday.

A total of 94 dissidents, eight of whom are tried in absentia, are on trial on charges of forming an organization with an aim to seize power.

Israel's Shin Bet domestic spy agency said on Tuesday it had foiled planned attacks on Israelis by two Palestinian Islamist groups in the Hebron area.

It said that, in March, Shin Bet, army and police uncovered a nine-man Hamas cell in the village of Bani Naim, south of the West Bank city, which planned to shoot dead an Israeli settler working in nearby fields.

Thousands gathered in Yemen's main southern city of Aden on Tuesday to call for renewed independence for the south 23 years after it united with the north.

Waving the flag of the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and portraits of exiled southern leader Ali Salem al-Baid, the protesters gathered at a square in the Khor Maksar district of Aden, Agence France Presse reported.

A planned Syria peace conference next month will only work if the government and rebels send credible negotiating teams, the U.N.'s deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson said Tuesday.

"There have to be two, credible delegations to negotiate," Eliasson told reporters in Geneva, the planned venue of the talks.

Egyptian troops and policemen began sweeps of north Sinai on Tuesday ahead of a possible showdown with heavily armed gunmen who abducted seven security personnel, officials said.

A senior interior ministry official told Agence France Presse a "campaign has been going on for half an hour", while a policeman taking part in the operation told AFP that security forces traded fire with gunmen in a village in the restive peninsula.

Radical Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia, which Tunisian authorities have branded a terrorist organization, has called for a protest in the city of Kairouan on Friday against the arrest of its spokesman.

"Call to all Muslims to a protest in support of Ansar al-Sharia's spokesman Seifeddine Rais, in front of the headquarters of ruling Islamist party Ennahda near Bab Jalladine" in Kairouan, the group said on its Facebook page.

Saudi authorities have arrested 10 more suspects in an alleged Iranian spy ring unveiled two months ago, an interior ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.

The eight Saudis, a Lebanese and a Turk bring the number of people arrested to 28, the official SPA news agency quoted the spokesman as saying.

The U.N.'s children's agency warned Tuesday that up to 20,000 civilians, mainly women and children, could be trapped by harsh fighting in the Syrian town of Qusayr.

"The situation is desperate," UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado told reporters in Geneva.

The U.N. said Tuesday the number of Syrian refugees flooding into Jordan had suddenly fallen from several thousand a day to close to zero, warning that fighting may be blocking people in need from coming.

"In Jordan in the last four days, we have seen a significant drop in the number of (Syrian) refugees arriving," Panos Moumtzis, who heads the U.N. refugee agency's response to the Syria crisis, told reporters in Geneva.

The Syrian regime has put forward a list of five officials including Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi as potential negotiators in talks with the opposition, European diplomatic sources said on Tuesday.

The list, provided to Moscow in early March, also includes deputy prime minister Qadri Jamil and three other officials, the sources said.