NATO ambassadors gather at 14:30 GMT on Friday to discuss an end to the alliance's six-month air campaign in Libya following the death of Moammar Gadhafi and the fall of his last bastions, diplomats said.

A NATO official said ambassadors from the 28-member alliance would meet in Brussels "with Libya on the agenda of talks".

Turkish jets kept up bombing raids on Kurdish rebel bases in northern Iraq overnight, as the rebels confirmed that some Turkish troops crossed into Iraq, officials and media reports said Friday.

Turkish war planes continued to take off from Diyarbakir, the regional capital of the mainly Kurdish southeast, to strike at Kurdish rebels who killed 24 soldiers in a string of coordinated attacks on Wednesday, local security forces said.

The U.N. Security Council will vote Friday on a resolution calling on Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh to immediately stand down and condemning the killings blamed on his government.

The proposed resolution, which has the backing of all five permanent members of the Security Council, "strongly condemns" government violence against demonstrators and backs a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) peace plan under which Saleh must hand over power.

NATO's operation in Libya can be considered over now that Moammar Gadhafi is dead and the new regime is in control of the entire country, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Friday.

"I think we can say that the military operation is finished, that the whole of Libyan territory is under the control of the National Transitional Council and that, subject to a few transitory measures in the week to come, the NATO operation has arrived at its end," Juppe told Europe 1 radio from India.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ready to partially freeze West Bank settlement building if it will bring the Palestinians back to direct talks, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.

According to Haaretz, the offer was made in a conversation with Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin on Wednesday during a surprise visit to the region in order to try and help the parties reach some kind of agreement on how to resume talks.

A grand jury in New York has indicted two Iranian men in an alleged plot to get Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, court papers showed Thursday.

The indictment was the next stage in the legal process after the initial complaint against Manssour Arbabsiar, who is in custody, and co-defendant Gholam Shakuri, who is at large.

A bloodied Moammar Gadhafi was seen alive and walking as he was being manhandled by Libya's new regime fighters before the announcement of his death Thursday, in a videotape aired on Arab satellite channels.

National Transitional Council fighters circled the 69-year-old ousted strongman, who was bloodied in the head, face and shoulders, as he apparently tried to cry out.

Clashes raged Thursday in Syria between troops and suspected army deserters as more civilians were reportedly killed in the crisis-hit country, a rights group said.

Violence in Syria has intensified in recent weeks as defections from the army reportedly increase, and at least five civilians died in Thursday's violence, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Here are the key dates in Libya's history over the past 100 years, after the announcement of the death of deposed strongman Moammar Gadhafi on Thursday:

- 1911-1912: Italy conquers Libya, which had been under domination of the Ottoman Empire since 1551.

Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who was killed when his hometown Sirte fell on Thursday after refusing to surrender, ruled his North African country for 42 years before being ousted in August.

Renowned for his flamboyant dress sense and rambling rhetoric, the embattled Libyan leader, 69, came up against an unprecedented challenge to his rule after anti-regime protests erupted on February 15.