U.S. President Barack Obama called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Tuesday to congratulate him on the Arab summit held last week and to stress his support for a unified Iraq.

In a statement announcing the call, the White House termed last week's Arab summit, Iraq's diplomatic coming-out party following the full withdrawal of U.S. troops late last year, a "success."

The U.N. Security Council will have to take "very urgent and serious" action if Syria fails to meet an April 10 deadline to halt its military operations in protest cities, U.S. ambassador Susan Rice said Tuesday.

U.N. Security Council members negotiated a statement backing the April 10 deadline that U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan says Syria has accepted, as fierce clashes were reported between government forces and rebels.

The United States said Tuesday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was failing to live up to pledges for a truce and warned that it will judge him by "his actions, not by his words."

Fierce clashes were reported again Tuesday in Syria despite Assad's assurances to peace envoy Kofi Annan that he would "immediately" start pulling back forces and complete a military withdrawal from urban areas by April 10.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are to hold renewed talks, in what would be their first public meeting in more than two months, a senior official said on Tuesday.

"There are preparations with the Israeli side to have a meeting between Saeb Erakat and Yitzhak Molcho in the next few hours or days," the senior Palestinian official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned Tuesday that the Middle East peace process was at a "dangerous impasse," and urged Israel to allow Palestinians under administrative detention to contest their imprisonment.

"The Middle East peace process is at a dangerous impasse," he said in a message to a two-day meeting on the legal and political implications of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons.

The International Criminal Court prosecutor said Tuesday he would hold off on a probe into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Palestinian territories until the U.N. rules on Palestinian statehood.

"The office (of the prosecutor) has assessed that it is for the relevant bodies at the U.N. or the Assembly of State Parties to make a legal determination whether Palestine qualifies as a state for the purpose of acceding to the Rome Statute", the court's founding treaty, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Clashes in western Libya have left at least 14 people dead and 80 others wounded in 24 hours, the ruling National Transitional Council said on Tuesday.

"Four people were killed and 35 others were wounded in Zuwarah," 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Tripoli, near the border with Tunisia, the interim authorities said in a statement published online.

Fierce clashes broke out between Syrian troops and rebels on Tuesday as the regime sent reinforcements into a number of hotspots despite President Bashar al-Assad's pledge to implement a peace plan.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting gripped several parts of the country including the southern province of Daraa, northwest Idlib province, Homs in central Syria and near the capital.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood on Tuesday defended its decision to run its deputy leader in a presidential election amid splits in the movement and accusations that the Islamists are trying to monopolize power.

The Brotherhood backtracked on an earlier pledge not to contest May's presidential election by announcing on Saturday that it would field deputy leader Khairat El-Shater.

Israeli forces on Tuesday razed four homes and dozens of electricity pylons near the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Palestinian witnesses and an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

"At 4:00 am (0100 GMT) army tractors demolished four homes and 52 electricity pylons in the al-Makhrureh area of Beit Jalla," Mazen al-Azzeh, coordinator of the Popular Campaign to Fight Settlements in Bethlehem, told AFP.