Egypt called on Israel Saturday to immediately halt punitive strikes on the Palestinian Gaza Strip after militants carried out deadly attacks in Israel.

"Egypt denounces the use of force against civilians in any circumstance and strongly advises Israel to immediately stop its military operations against Gaza," a foreign ministry statement said.

Tunisian troops clashed with a group of armed Libyans overnight in southwest Tunisia, an official said Saturday, as a former Libyan prime minister reportedly made it to Italy after fleeing Tripoli.

Abdessalam Jalloud, who was a former prime minister ostracized from Moammar Gadhafi's regime, is thought to have fled Libya through Tunisia, in another sign that the Tripoli regime may be hanging by a thread.

A monitoring force stationed in the Sinai in keeping with the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel said Israel violated it when its troops entered Egyptian territory and fired on security personnel, state news agency MENA reported on Saturday.

"The (Multinational Force and Observer) recorded two violations committed by Israel," the agency said, citing an MFO report.

Libyan rebel chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil said on Saturday "the end is very near" for Moammar Gadhafi and that it will be "catastrophic," as insurgents pushing on the capital claimed to have seized a third key town in 24 hours.

"We have contacts with people from the inner circle of Gadhafi," said the chairman of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC). "All evidence (shows) that the end is very near, with God's grace."

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Saturday said Israel "regrets" the deaths of Egyptian policemen killed on the border during an Israeli pursuit of militants who killed eight Israelis.

"Israel regrets the deaths of Egyptian policemen during the attacks on the Egyptian-Israeli border," Barak said about Thursday's assault by gunmen in the Eilat region of Israel.

Libyan rebels have taken "all" of the strategic oil hub of Brega in the east of the country, a rebel military official told Agence France Presse on Saturday.

"The industrial zone is under our control, all Brega is now under our control," the top-ranking official said on condition of anonymity, a day after rebels claimed they had seized two other key towns as they pushed their advance on the capital Tripoli.

Opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad were meeting Saturday in Istanbul to launch a "national council" to coordinate the fight against the Damascus regime, organizers said.

Participants in two days of meetings in an Istanbul hotel, from both inside and outside Syria, planned to set up working groups and draft measures aimed at ousting Assad, who was targeted by new international sanctions on Friday.

Al-Qaida's front group in Iraq said it has launched a campaign of 100 attacks across the country since the middle of August, in a statement seen Saturday by Agence France Presse

The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) said the campaign began on August 15, Iraq's deadliest day in more than a year, and would exact revenge for the death of Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a U.S. special forces raid in Pakistan in May, and other senior leaders.

The two crew of a Tunisian military helicopter were killed when it crashed Saturday near the Libyan border in the south of the country, a government source said, blaming a technical failure.

The accident happened at Rbayh, 30 kilometers (12 miles) from Ben Guerdane, in an area where the Tunisian army presence has been strengthened in anticipation of an influx of refugees from war-torn Libya.

Turkish planes carried out two raids in Iraq on Friday and bombarded 85 Kurdish rebel targets, the army announced Saturday, without giving any possible casualty figures.

Turkey resumed its bombing of positions held by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the Iraq mountains after a break of more than a year following an attack on Wednesday in southeast Turkey in which nine members of the Turkish security forces were killed.