A service truck crashed into a passenger lounge of Jeddah international airport in Saudi Arabia, killing two Iranian pilgrims and injuring four others, reports said on Friday.

The truck, driven by a Nepalese man, careened through the glass panes of the King Abdulaziz International Airport terminal on Thursday, the reports said, citing the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority.

Israel's police deployed reinforcements in Jerusalem on Friday, fearing days of violent protests in the West Bank could spread to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound after weekly Muslim prayers.

"There is heightened security in and around the Old City. Extra police officers from different areas have been brought in to prevent any incidents from occurring today," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

Israel's government on Friday strenuously denied it had any link to an arms-laden ship that Egypt said its navy seized as it sailed from the Israeli port of Eilat to Togo in West Africa.

"Nobody in Israel knows anything about this ship. It's clear that it did not come from Eilat or any other Israeli port," foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told Agence France Presse.

Gaza's Hamas rulers on Friday urged the United Nations to reconsider its suspension of food aid for Palestinian refugees, imposed after protesters stormed a U.N. depot.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, stopped food deliveries after dozens of Gazans forced their way into the field office on Thursday, demanding reinstatement of a monthly cash allowance to poor families which was halted from April 1 due to budget cuts.

The United States urged Bahrain's Sunni-led government on Thursday to promote dialogue with the Shiite opposition after two years of political upheaval in the country.

U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Rashad Hussain met senior Bahraini government officials, political leaders, civil society activists and religious leaders in Manama earlier this week.

The newly reelected chief of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, pledged on Thursday to work to end a rift with his West Bank rival, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

Meshaal, speaking at a pro-Palestinian conference in Cairo, "affirmed his movement's solicitude for ending the division with its negative effects," the Palestinian Safa news agency quoted his as saying.

The U.N. is hiking its estimates of people trapped in Syria after fleeing their homes, saying Wednesday some four million are now displaced inside the country and in dire need of international help.

The figure, due to be officially released in the coming days, is a dramatic increase on earlier estimates of some 2.5 million displaced put forward by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for the period from January to June.

Egypt's navy on Thursday seized a weapons-laden ship and detained its crew who had set off from the Israeli port of Eilat en route to the African country of Togo, security officials said.

Officials the ship, "which was flying the flag of an African country," was intercepted after it strayed into Egyptian territorial waters.

Direct road links between Egypt and Sudan will open soon, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said on Thursday, beginning a two-day visit which Khartoum has called "historic".

Morsi's first trip to the neighboring country, which Egypt jointly ruled with Britain until 1956, comes nearly a year after his election.

A solution to the conflict in Western Sahara, where a U.N. peacekeeping force has been deployed for two decades, is more important than ever as a result of the Islamist revolt raging in northern Mali, the French president said on Thursday.

"The economic potential is enormous. But I am also aware of the obstacles, and the question of the Western Sahara, which has been waiting to be resolved for more than 30 years," President Francois Hollande told the Moroccan parliament.