Tripoli is negotiating a way out of the Libyan crisis with France not with its rebel foes, the son of embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said in an interview published Monday.

"We are in fact holding real negotiations with France and not with the rebels," Seif Al-Islam said during the interview with the Algerian daily el-Khabar conducted in the Libyan capital.

The army has stopped a pickup truck loaded with contraband arms near Egypt's border with Libya, the scene of an armed revolt since February, the state news agency MENA reported on Sunday.

It said the vehicle was intercepted around 90 kilometers south of the Salloum border post but the driver managed to flee.

Libya's rebel council issued a blunt warning to neighboring Algeria on Sunday, insisting that it must "stop supporting Gadhafi," as tensions between the North African countries bubbled to the surface.

Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, vice president of Libya's National Transitional Council, accused Algeria of supporting Moammar Gadhafi militarily in the early days of the near five-month-long war, and that it continued to support him politically.

Around 2,000 Chadian migrants trapped in war-torn Libya are being flown back to their homeland, the International Organization for Migration said on Saturday.

The group -- mostly women and children -- have been stuck in the southern desert towns of Sabha and Gatroun while trying to flee across the Sahara to Chad.

Embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said in an audio message relayed to supporters on Friday that his regime will not fall and told NATO to stop attacking his troops.

"The regime in Libya will not fall -- it is based on the people, not on Gadhafi. NATO is wrong if it thinks it can topple the regime of this country," he said in the message to thousands of supporters in Sabha, some 750 kilometers south of Tripoli.

Fearing an acute shortage of medical and other essential supplies, Libya's rival factions are in talks with the United Nations to ease international sanctions on the war-torn nation, Agence France Presse has learned.

Well-placed U.N. officials said representatives from Libya's rebel council and Moammar Gadhafi's regime held talks last week with the World Health Organization aimed at drawing up a list of items for sanctions relief.

Five sick Libyan babies and children arrived in Malta overnight Thursday for treatment at the country's public hospital, a government statement said.

The children, aged between four months and five years, arrived on a flight from rebel-held Benghazi accompanied by relatives. They were welcomed by Health Minister Joe Cassar.

Libyan rebels Wednesday seized the desert hamlet of Gualish Wednesday on the first day of a NATO-backed push on the capital Tripoli and captured a number of African mercenaries, Agence France Presse reported.

Buoyed by French arms drops and NATO-led air strikes, the rebels attacked positions in the Gualish area, in the plains north of their enclave in the Nafusa mountains southwest of Tripoli.

Libyan rebel leaders for the first time will hold talks with NATO's 28-nation North Atlantic Council on July 13 to present their plans for democratic transition, the organization’s chief said Wednesday.

Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the rebel forces were making progress in their battle against Moammar Gadhafi's troops while the Libyan leader's "plans to retake country by force have fallen apart."

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday accused Bahrain of carrying out a "campaign of violent oppression" against its citizens and called for an end to abuses.

Pro-reform protesters took to the streets of Bahrain on February 14, but security forces crushed the demonstrations a month later in a bloody crackdown followed by sweeping arrests.