The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session next week on abuses by Boko Haram militants in Nigeria and neighboring countries, the council president said Friday.

The rights council rarely convenes special sessions, with only 22 held since the body was created in 2006.

Tunisia's National Bardo Museum is set to reopen to the public Tuesday after a jihadist attack that killed 20 foreigners, as the country looks to restore faith in its tourism sector.

Museum officials said the reopening, which will be marked with a ceremony, was "a message" to the gunmen who killed the tourists and a police officer there last Wednesday.

Algerian soldiers killed two Islamist militants and seized guns and explosives southwest of the capital on Tuesday, the defense ministry said.

The two were killed during an early morning sweep of an area near Grabiz, southwest of Ain Defla city, a statement said.

Mali's Tuareg-led rebels described a proposed peace deal with the government as "fundamentally flawed" in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse on Monday summarizing days of their discussions on the accord.

The Algiers Agreement, hammered out over eight months of tough negotiations in Algeria, was proposed in order to bring a lasting peace and transfer significant powers to an area of northern desert the size of Texas that the rebels refer to as "Azawad".

Eleven people were killed and 25 injured when a long-distance bus collided with a lorry on Algeria's Trans-Sahara Highway, emergency services said.

The accident happened near the oasis town of In Salah, around 1,500 kilometers (950 miles) south of the capital Algiers.

An envoy from Qatar was in Beirut on Thursday to mediate in the case of the Lebanese servicemen taken hostage by jihadists last year, al-Mustaqbal daily reported.

Government sources told the newspaper the mediator's arrival in the Lebanese capital was a sign that the negotiations on the captives have made a serious development.

Soldiers killed three Islamist militants and seized guns and explosives southwest of the Algerian capital on Tuesday, the defense ministry said.

"During anti-terrorist operations, an army unit killed three terrorists today after an attempted ambush in the Tagrara area" 150 kilometers (90 miles) from Algiers, it said in a statement.

Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq is scheduled to travel to the United States later in March where he set to meet with a number of officials, reported al-Joumhouria newspaper on Saturday.

The agenda of his trip is not complete yet, but the details of it were discussed during a meeting the minister held on Friday with U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale.

Algeria's parliament passed a law on Thursday criminalizing violence against women, in a move criticized by both Islamist lawmakers as well as Amnesty.

The law makes inflicting injury on one's spouse punishable with up to 20 years in prison, and allows a judge to hand down life sentences for domestic violence resulting in death. 

The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday urged Mali's Tuareg rebel groups to sign on to a peace deal that it welcomed as an important step towards lasting peace in Mali.

The Malian government signed the agreement reached in Algiers at the weekend as did some northern armed groups, but the main Tuareg rebel alliance, known as the Coordination, asked for more time.