Qatari security forces have made arrests over the murder of a European woman, the interior ministry said Wednesday, after a 24-year-old British teacher was found dead in the Gulf state.

Teacher Lauren Patterson went missing on Saturday after a night out, according to British press reports. Her body was found shortly afterwards.

At least 41 fighters have been killed in violent clashes pitting Kurds against jihadists and Islamist rebels in northeastern Syria, a monitoring group said on Wednesday.

Kurdish fighters from several villages in oil-rich Hasake province are engaged in combat against al-Qaida affiliated groups the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel kept up its alarmist rhetoric on talks between world powers and Iran Wednesday, with a cabinet minister comparing the situation to pre-war Europe and the appeasement of Nazi Germany.

"We view the nuclear talks in Geneva with hope and with concern. We see the worrying signs and we don't want Geneva 2013 to turn into Munich 1938," International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz said in remarks broadcast by Israel's army radio.

Rebels fighting President Bashar Assad's regime in southern Syria said Wednesday the main opposition National Coalition had "failed" and announced they no longer recognize the Western-backed group.

The video statement signed by nearly 70 groups comes after a group of key rebel groups in the north of the country announced their rejection of the National Coalition in late September.

A powerful blast ripped through a pickup truck in the southern province of Daraa in Syria early Wednesday, killing 21 people including four children, a monitoring group said.

"Twenty-one people were killed in the Nawa area (of Daraa), among them four children and six women, in a blast that detonated as their vehicle went past Tal al-Jumua," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The United States is trying to persuade a key Syrian opposition group to drop its refusal to join planned peace talks, saying its participation is essential, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

The Syrian National Council, which is the biggest bloc within the Syrian opposition coalition, said at the weekend it would not attend the talks planned for next month and would quit the umbrella group if it does.

A police officer was gunned down in a motorcycle drive-by shooting Tuesday in a region of southeast Yemen where al-Qaida carries out frequent attacks, a local official said.

"Two armed men suspected of belonging to al-Qaida opened fire at the officer, Mahmoud al-Nakhii, who was in a police car in the main street of Ghayl Bawazir," a town in Hadramawt province, he told Agence France Presse.

None of Syria's chemical weapons sites are under rebel control, the key opposition National Coalition said on Tuesday.

The assertion came after the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said one abandoned site was in a rebel-held area and that inspectors from a U.N.-OPCW team were hoping to visit it.

As Muslims around the world mark the Eid al-Adha holiday, sharing festive meals, children trapped in besieged areas around the Syrian capital are going hungry, activists and medics say.

In some areas children have died from severe malnutrition, according to one NGO, and a cleric told Agence France Presse he had issued a religious ruling allowing the eating of dog and cat meat.

Leaders of rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas spoke via telephone on the eve of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, stressing the need for reconciliation, a Hamas official said Tuesday.

Gaza's Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya spoke to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas of the "need for a return to national unity and an end to division" during the late night conversation, a Hamas official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.