A Kurdish rebel who hijacked a Turkish ferry with 24 people aboard was killed early Saturday and all his hostages brought to safety after an ordeal of more than 12 hours, authorities said.

"Soon after the beginning of an operation (by Turkish security forces), the hijacker was captured dead," Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu told NTV private television.

An earthquake rocked eastern Turkey late Wednesday, killing seven people and toppling buildings less than three weeks after a massive quake killed more than 600 people in the same area.

Television footage showed rescue teams searching through the rubble trying to find possible survivors after the 5.6 magnitude quake struck near the city of Van, sending two hotels and about two dozen other buildings crashing down.

A preliminary 5.7-magnitude earthquake caused a six-story hotel and other buildings to collapse in eastern Turkey on Wednesday, trapping people inside, according to media reports, two weeks after a strong temblor in the region killed around 600 people.

State-run TRT television said the quake brought down the hotel as well as some buildings that had been damaged in the earlier quake in the province of Van. TV footage showed residents and rescuers trying to lift debris to evacuate people believed to be trapped under the hotel in the provincial capital of Van.

Iraqi Kurd leader Massud Barzani said Saturday he opposes Turkey's military campaign against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq as it will fail to permanently end the conflict.

Barzani arrived in Ankara Thursday for talks focused on Turkey's ongoing operation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

More than one million people have visited the autonomous Kurdistan region in north Iraq -- a haven of relative stability -- in the past nine months, a tourism official said on Saturday.

"The number of tourists who visited Kurdistan during the last nine months reached 1.15 million tourists," Mawlawi Jabbar, the head of the General Committee for Tourism in the Kurdistan tourism and municipalities ministry, told Agence France Presse.

The Israeli navy on Friday intercepted two international ships carrying pro-Palestinian activists who were trying to break the blockade on Gaza, a military statement said.

"A short while ago, Israel navy soldiers boarded the vessels which were en route to the Gaza Strip, attempting to break the maritime security blockade that is in place in accordance with international law," it said.

A Turkish military jet crashed Thursday morning near the central Anatolian province of Konya, killing its two pilots, officials said.

The F-4 plane belonging to the Turkish air force fell at 08:38 GMT during a training flight, near the Konya province, the Turkey general staff said in a statement posted on its website.

Two ships carrying medical aid and activists have set sail from Turkey in a new bid to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, pro-Palestinian activists said on Wednesday.

A statement issued by the Freedom Waves group said the mini-flotilla made up of one Irish ship and one Canadian ship had left Fethiye on Turkey's south coast on Wednesday afternoon and planned to arrive in Gaza on Friday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday that Berlin wanted the United Nations to take a firmer line on Syria's attacks on civilians after nearly eight months of deadly violence.

Merkel told reporters after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that they agreed in "condemning the human rights violations occurring in Syria".

Fourteen countries, including neighbors China, Pakistan and India agreed Wednesday at an international conference to cooperate in building the future of war-torn Afghanistan, a Turkish diplomat said.

"An agreement was reached at a technical level," said the diplomat, naming the initiative as the Istanbul process, in order to build a secure and stable Afghanistan.