Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said on Sunday he is ready for a power transfer through early elections, saying he is "committed" to a plan brokered by Gulf states.

"You who are running after power, let us head together toward the ballot boxes," Saleh said in a speech aired on state television on the 49th anniversary of the September 26, 1962 revolution that saw Yemen proclaimed a republic.

Libya's new rulers said Sunday they have unearthed a mass grave of 1,700 prisoners slain by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in a 1996 uprising, a massacre that helped trigger the revolt that ousted the despot.

The gruesome find came as hundreds of the National Transitional Council's fighters thrust into Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte from the east and NATO warplanes pounded the coastal city for a second straight day.

Syrian security forces on Sunday shot dead seven people across the country, the Syrian Revolution General Commission said, as the authorities pressed on with a crackdown on anti-regiment dissent.

Troop reinforcements were dispatched to the flashpoint province of Homs and the Damascus suburb of Douma, activists said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sunday he favors the adoption of a plan by the international Quartet that foresees a peace deal with the Palestinians by the end of 2012.

"I think we must accept the Quartet proposal, for it includes a very positive point -- the opening of negotiations with no preconditions," he told Israeli public radio from New York.

Egypt's security forces said on Sunday they seized anti-aircraft missiles and launchers probably destined for the neighboring Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip.

The eight missiles and shoulder-mounted launchers were found in four wooden boxes near the Suez Canal, security officials said, adding the smugglers appeared to have fled moments before security forces arrived.

Thousands of cheering Palestinians welcomed their president Mahmoud Abbas at his Ramallah headquarters on Sunday as he returned from delivering a historic U.N. membership bid.

An Agence France Presse reporter saw Abbas descend from his motorcade and enter the presidential building known as the Muqataa.

Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz announced on Sunday he was giving women the right to vote and run in municipal elections, the only public polls in the ultra-conservative Gulf kingdom.

He also announced that women would have the right to join the all-appointed Shoura (consultative) Council, in an address opening a new term of the council.

Forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi attacked the Ghadames oasis southwest of Tripoli at dawn on Sunday, killing at least five new regime fighters, a local official and two witnesses told Agence France Presse.

"We came under attack at dawn today from Gadhafi loyalists and groups of Tuaregs," Muhandes Sirajeddin, deputy chief of the local council in Ghadames 600 kilometers (370 miles) southwest of the capital, told AFP by telephone.

Yemen troops opened fire Sunday on protesters calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be tried for crimes against Yemenis, killing one person, hours before he was expected to make a speech.

The protester was shot in the head as he shouted into a megaphone while perched on top of a minivan that was leading the march of tens of thousands of people in the city, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Multiple blasts at a passport and identity card office in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala killed at least nine people on Sunday, part of nationwide violence that left 12 dead.

The series of explosions in the central city also wounded nearly 100 people and caused major damage to buildings, leading security forces to cordon off the scene and close all entrances to Karbala.