A small town in central France was "devastated" Friday on hearing news that an entire family that lived there was on board the Air Algerie plane that crashed in Mali.

Bruno Cailleret and Caroline Boisnard, who lived in the 550-strong town of Menet, "were coming back from a trip to Burkina Faso with their two children, Elno, 14 and Chloe, 10," said Denise Labbe of the local town hall.

France announced on Friday there were no survivors among the 116 people on board the Air Algerie flight that crashed over Mali, saying bad weather was the likely cause of the disaster.

"Sadly, there are no survivors," President Francois Hollande said on television, a day after flight AH017, carrying 54 French nationals, went down shortly after take-off from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.

"We heard about the disappearance of the plane on television". In French airports where some passengers of the missing Air Algerie flight were due to end their trip, relatives desperately waited for news of their loved ones.

Flight AH5017, which took off in Ouagadougou and was bound for Algiers, disappeared in the early morning over Mali with at least 116 passengers and crew on board, including around 50 French nationals -- some of whom were transiting through the Algerian capital on their way to France.

President Francois Hollande announced on Thursday an 11-million-euro ($14.8 million) aid package to the besieged Gaza Strip, where an Israeli military offensive has left more than 700 people dead.

An advisor to Hollande said the humanitarian aid, eight million of which will be given to the Palestinian Authority and the remainder to U.N. bodies and NGOs working in Gaza, was approved after a meeting with non-governmental organizations working in the strife-torn region.

Several thousands held a fresh protest in Paris on Wednesday against the Israeli offensive in Gaza amid tight security days after similar rallies descended into violence and looting.

Rival armed factions in the Central African Republic agreed to a tentative ceasefire on Wednesday at a peace conference held in neighbouring Congo. 

Britain and France are trading accusations of hypocrisy over sanctions against Russia in a row that reveals deeper European divisions on how to react to the MH17 disaster, analysts said Wednesday.

The "Entente Cordiale" entered one of its less cordial phases this week, with Britain slamming France's 1.2 billion euro ($1.6 billion) warship deal with Moscow, and Paris saying London remains a haven for Russian oligarchs.

France's final appeals court Wednesday cleared the extradition to Belgium of a French-Algerian man suspected of carrying out a deadly shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

The decision by the Cour de Cassation was no surprise as Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, had dropped an appeal against his extradition.

Two bills that aim to tackle France's saturated, inefficient asylum system and reform stringent immigration rules are already attracting controversy before they have even been officially introduced.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who was to submit the two bills at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, stressed in an interview with daily Liberation that France must continue to welcome immigrants as "countries that are closed in on themselves are doomed to decline."

Several thousands Wednesday held a fresh protest in Paris against the Israeli offensive in Gaza amid tight security days after similar rallies descended into violence and looting.

Police said the rally gathered about 14,500 people, while organizers put the figure at 25,000.