Bahraini opposition activists, inspired by the success of street protests in Egypt, plan to demonstrate near the U.S. embassy on Wednesday in defiance of a government ban.

The Sunni rulers of the Shiite-majority Gulf kingdom have assumed sweeping new powers to crush demonstrations but the protest organizers insist they will go ahead.

A proposed international peace conference on Syria that aims to bring together President Bashar Assad's allies and the opposition will probably not happen until October at the very earliest, a top Russian official said.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said additional preparatory talks for the meeting will be held between Moscow and Washington at the end of August, and that the diplomatic schedule was already busy for September.

Attacks in Iraq killed 13 people on Tuesday, including four who died in a blast targeting Shiite worshippers, while militants bombed a major oil pipeline, halting exports, officials said.

The attacks are the latest in a surge in violence that security forces have failed to curb, despite carrying out major operations against militants said to have resulted in scores of arrests, including 82 on Monday.

Middle East peace talks could "collapse" due to continuing Israeli settlement expansion, a senior Palestinian official warned Tuesday, on the eve of the scheduled resumption of the fragile process.

"Settlement expansion goes against the U.S. administration's pledges and threatens to cause the negotiations' collapse," Yasser Abed Rabbo told Agence France Presse.

A colonel in the restive Libyan city of Benghazi escaped a bomb attack on Tuesday after discovering the device placed under his car outside his home, a security official said.

The incident comes a day after a TV journalist survived an attack in Benghazi after coming under a hail of bullets.

The United States urged Egypt's new leaders Monday to halt all "politically motivated arrests and detentions," but there was no specific mention of the future of ousted president Mohamed Morsi.

State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said the continued holding of people in custody was one of the problems Egypt has to resolve on its own if it is to move beyond the political unrest of the past six weeks.

Israel intercepted and destroyed a rocket fired from Egyptian territory at the Red Sea town of Eilat overnight, Israeli public radio said Tuesday.

A jihadist group had earlier said they fired a Grad rocket at Eilat in retaliation for an alleged Israeli air raid.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Palestinians "not to react adversely" Monday to Israel's announcement of more settlement building, and stressed the importance of "getting to the table quickly."

The chief U.S. diplomat, visiting Colombia, said that Israel's announcement on new settlements was "to some degree expected" and he did not think it would become a "speed bump" to a recently relaunched peace process.

Some 14,000 prisoners who escaped from various Libyan detention centers after the 2011 uprising against Moammar Gadhafi are still on the run, the interior minister said Monday.

Speaking less than three weeks after more than 1,200 detainees escaped during riots from a prison in the eastern city of Benghazi, Mohamed al-Cheikh told ministry officials the interior and justice ministries were "working together to get them back to prison so they can serve out their sentences".

Tunisia's army on Monday bombarded suspected jihadist positions in a rugged mountain range near the Algerian border, as it kept up operations against Islamists following a deadly ambush on troops.

The offensive was launched on August 1, after eight soldiers were found with their throats cut after being ambushed by militants, and at a time of deep political crisis in Tunisia.