Jerusalem police closed the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound to non-Muslim visitors on Thursday, in what they said was an effort to avoid a repetition of recent Palestinian unrest.

The decision followed disturbances on Wednesday in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem where police used stun grenades, water cannons and mounted officers against Palestinians who hurled rocks during protests marking the anniversary of Israel's foundation in 1948.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili said on Thursday that nuclear talks with the EU'S foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton were "long and useful" and that both sides have decided to continue the discussions.

"Last night, as Lady Ashton said, we had long, useful talks," Jalili said in Istanbul. "We had the chance to go into details. We decided to continue working and keep on our talks."

Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said on Thursday that the government wants to give retroactive approval to four West Bank settlement outposts it had previously pledged to at least partially demolish.

In a written response to a petition Peace Now submitted to Israel's Supreme Court against the outposts, the state attorney's office said that settlers had now purchased the private Palestinian land on which they built, paving the way for the government to give its blessing.

Kuwait is to bar foreigners from attending public hospitals in the mornings, local media reported on Thursday, in a decision activists labelled as "racist".

The decision comes after complaints in parliament of Kuwaiti patients having to wait for treatment at public health facilities because of the large number of expatriates.

A Jordanian air force plane on a training flight crashed on Thursday due to a technical failure, killing the pilot and a trainee, an official in the armed forces' general command said in a statement.

"At 6:55 am (0355 GMT) on Thursday morning one of the training planes, a Firefly, at the King Hussein air force college (in Mafraq, in northern Jordan), crashed in a training area to the west of the college after a technical failure during a routine training flight," the statement said.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on Thursday summoned his defense and interior ministers over the kidnapping hours earlier of policemen and soldiers in the Sinai peninsula, the official MENA agency reported.

The crisis talks at the presidential palace come after unidentified gunmen kidnapped three Egyptian policemen and four soldiers in the lawless Sinai peninsula, security officials said.

Kidnappers in Yemen have freed three International Red Cross employees, including a Swiss and a Kenyan, along with two Egyptian hostages, following tribal mediation, a local official said Thursday.

"We have managed to obtain the release of the five hostages kidnapped by the Al-Marakisha tribe," who released them overnight Wednesday, said Abdellatif Sayed, a local commander with the military-linked Popular Resistance Committees.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday that "urgent" pressure must be put on the rival Syrian sides to propose names for a transitional government.

Cameron said after talks with U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon that he "fully supports" plans for a new international peace conference that could be held in Geneva next month.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will take part in a meeting of the so-called "Friends of Syria" group in Jordan next week, a U.S. official confirmed Wednesday.

"The secretary looks forward to attending," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told journalists about the talks to be hosted in Amman, adding that "a substantial amount of our diplomatic energy is focused on this."

An al-Qaida-linked cell broken up in Egypt at the weekend planned to bomb the U.S. and French embassies in Cairo, state news agency MENA quoted investigators as saying on Wednesday.

"The accused planned suicide car bombings outside the embassies of France and the United States in Egypt," MENA said