French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius insisted on Saturday that his country's "absolute priority" is to secure a truce in Gaza, saying an Egyptian initiative for ceasefire enjoys international support.

At a joint news conference with his Jordanian counterpart, Nasser Judeh, Fabius said his regional tour seeks to help "break the spiral of violence and to protect the civilian population as much as possible" in Gaza, where the Israeli bombardment has killed more than 330 Palestinians.

French police have banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris on Saturday after protesters last weekend tried to storm two synagogues in the capital during a similar rally.

Police said in a statement Friday they could not guarantee a safe march "due to heightened tensions" fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More than 7,000 migrants have been arrested in Calais trying to illegally cross the Channel into Britain in the first half of 2014, more than double the figure a year ago, officials said Friday.

The prefecture of the French port town said 7,414 people had been arrested between January and June this year against 3,129 a year earlier.

European airlines were told Thursday to avoid Ukraine's airspace after a Malaysia Airlines plane crashed in the east of the country.

In France, a statement by junior transport minister Frederic Cuvillier said he had advised "French airlines to avoid Ukraine's air space as long as the reasons behind this catastrophe are not known."

A jihadist movement led by al-Qaida-linked Mokhtar Belmokhtar has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack that killed a French soldier in Mali, the private Mauritanian news agency Alakhbar reported.

"A jihadist of our group succeeded in blowing up his booby-trapped vehicle against a unit of the invasion forces in the al-Moustarat region," killing one French soldier and wounding others, a spokesman for the group al-Mourabitoune, Abou Aassim El-Mouhajir, said late Wednesday via the agency.

France braced Wednesday for more protests against Israel's deadly bombing of Gaza just days after demonstrators in Paris tried to storm two synagogues to the concern of Muslim and Jewish community leaders.

Some 50 political parties, unions and activist groups have called for rallies across France on Wednesday evening to seek an "immediate end" to the Israeli offensive that has left 208 dead and to demand sanctions against the Jewish state.

France said Wednesday the European Union could set up observer missions at border crossings between the Gaza Strip and Israel to try to encourage a lasting truce between the two sides.

The proposal by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius came as an Israeli air campaign on Gaza that has killed 208 people entered its ninth day after a failed ceasefire effort.

Ukraine's Western-backed leaders on Tuesday invited pro-Kremlin insurgents to a video-conference aimed at halting spiraling violence and what Kiev has warned was an imminent invasion by thousands of Russian troops.

Kiev sharply raised the stakes in Europe's most explosive crisis in decades by declaring on Monday that a Ukrainian transport plane downed in the eastern conflict zone had been hit by a rocket fired from the Russian side of the frontier between the two ex-Soviet states.

A French legionnaire has been killed in a suicide attack in northern Mali, taking to nine the number of soldiers to have died in the west African country since 2013, the defense ministry said Tuesday.

The fatality comes just days before President Francois Hollande is due to travel to west Africa as France prepares to redeploy some of its troops from Mali to the wider, largely lawless Sahel region to combat extremist violence.

French leader Francois Hollande on Monday denied having influenced the justice system in a corruption scandal surrounding Nicolas Sarkozy after the former president claimed he was the victim of "political interference."

"I not only did not do it (influence the justice system) but I couldn't even have thought about it as it goes so against the conception of democracy and also the spirit of my responsibility," he said in a television interview on France's national day.