Violence in Libya killed 643 people last year, amid a sharp rise in crime, according to a parliamentary report that laments a lack of effective policing in the increasingly lawless North African country.

Excerpts of a report by the internal affairs committee of the General National Congress did not give comparative figures for deaths in 2012 nor data on crimes committed.

A Twitter account of Hamas's armed wing has been suspended by administrators, the Palestinian Islamist movement said Thursday, accusing the social media site of censorship.

The account of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, @AlqassamBrigade, appeared to have been suspended several times over the past week, and was still inaccessible with a "suspended" notice on Thursday.

The Algerian army killed four armed Islamists overnight in an ambush south of the capital, the defense ministry announced Thursday.

"During an operation carried out by a unit of the ANP (Algerian army)... four terrorists were eliminated at around midnight, during an ambush" on a road near Berrouaghia, in the Medea region, 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Algiers, the ministry said.

Dozens rallied in the Yemeni capital on Thursday demanding the government resign after a law professor representing Shiite Huthi rebels at reconciliation talks was shot dead this week.

"The people want to overthrow the government," chanted the protesters, who gathered in response to calls by the Huthi rebels, known as Ansarullah (Partisans of God). "Government of corruption, leave the country."

The conflict in South Sudan has been marked by human rights abuses as bad as those reported from war-torn nations like Syria and Somalia, a senior aid official said Thursday.

Jan Egeland, a former United Nations aid chief and now head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said reports of large-scale recruitment of child soldiers signaled that the month-old conflict could still get worse.

Shelling in Fallujah, a town near Baghdad held by anti-government fighters, killed four people, officials said Thursday, as Barack Obama pressed "political measures" along with security operations to fight militancy.

But with an election looming in April, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has taken a hard line and trumpeted assaults on militants, with security forces announcing the killing of more than 50 fighters in recent air strikes amid ongoing efforts to retake areas of another city partly out of government control.

Nearly 1,400 people have been killed in Syria since clashes between rebel forces and the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant erupted this month, a monitor said Thursday.

"The number of people killed in fighting between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Islamist and rebel forces since January 3 has risen to 1,395," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Iraq executed 11 men convicted of charges related to "terrorism" on Thursday, the justice ministry said, just days after another mass execution of 26 convicts.

"The ministry executed 11 people today, after they were convicted of terrorism charges," it said in a statement. "The total of those executed this week is now 37, all of them Iraqis."

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday that elections would be the best way of ending the civil war in Syria and warned the West it could not impose a political solution on Tehran's neighbor and ally.

Speaking as fledgling Syrian peace talks entered a second day on the other side of Switzerland, Rouhani told the World Economic Forum that the Syrian people should be allowed to decide their own destiny.

Human Rights Watch hit out at the United Arab Emirates for preventing it from holding a news conference Thursday to release a report criticizing rights violations in the Gulf state.

"Blocking Human Rights Watch from holding a news conference in the UAE sadly underscores the increasing threat to freedom of expression in the country," said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's chief for the Middle East and North Africa.