Identifying the victims from last week's Air Algerie crash in Mali "could take weeks, months and maybe years", Algeria's chief of police said on Thursday.

An Air Algerie McDonnell Douglas 83 flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers crashed in northern Mali last Thursday, killing all 118 people on board.

Spain will temporarily evacuate its ambassador and most of its embassy staff from Libya because of the "worsening security situation" in the capital Tripoli, the foreign ministry said Thursday.

"The government of Spain trusts that the situation of instability in Libya can be overcome soon and reiterates its call for a ceasefire as soon as possible," the statement added.

Yemen has repatriated eight Saudis wanted for suspected links to Al-Qaida, the kingdom's interior ministry announced on Thursday, in the second handover of its kind since February.

"As part of joint efforts between security services in the two countries, the kingdom has received eight Saudis wanted" for joining Al-Qaida in Yemen, a ministry spokesman said, quoted by official news agency SPA.

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay on Thursday slammed what she said was Israel's "deliberate defiance" of international law during the Gaza conflict.

Pillay lambasted the country's attacks on homes, schools, hospitals and United Nations facilities which are sheltering 250,000 civilians in Gaza.

Dutch police have arrested two people for allegedly chanting "Death to the Jews" at a pro-Palestinian demonstration, the public prosecutor's office said on Thursday.

The jihadist Islamic State (IS), which has taken over large swathes of war-torn Syria in just a few months, was on Thursday engaged in fighting Kurds and members of a Sunni tribe.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the well-equipped Kurds, who started fighting IS soon after it emerged in Syria in spring last year, had on Wednesday taken back several hills surrounding the city of Ain al-Arab (Kobane in Kurdish) in the north.

The chief of Iran's elite Quds Force has ridiculed calls for Hamas to be disarmed and urged the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza to "turn the land and skies into hell" for Israel.

Major General Qassem Suleimani's message to militant factions resisting Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip was published late Wednesday by Iran's official IRNA news agency.

The U.S. suicide bomber who blew himself up at an army post in northwest Syria spent several months back home after training as a militant, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Israel mobilised 16,000 additional reservists, taking their total to 86,000, as military operations in the Gaza Strip continue, an army spokeswoman said Thursday.

The Philippines renewed calls for thousands of its nationals to leave Libya on Thursday after a Filipina nurse was abducted and gang-raped, following the beheading of a Filipino construction worker.