The alliance controlling Libya's capital Tripoli said Wednesday it welcomed a draft U.N. agreement aimed at lifting the country out of months of chaos by forming a national unity government.

U.N. envoy Bernardino Leon's fourth version of a proposed pact between the Fajr Libya Islamist militia-led alliance and Libya's internationally recognized government contained "positive proposals that could lead to a political solution", the Tripoli administration said in a statement.

A Libyan jihadist group denied Tuesday that Al-Qaida-linked militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar -- the man behind multiple deadly attacks with a history of coming back from the dead -- was killed in a US air strike.

Ansar al-Sharia named seven people it said were killed in the U.S. strike in eastern Libya but Belmokhtar, who Washington has said was the target, was not among them.

The United States deployed two F-15 fighter jets equipped with guided bombs, along with spotter drones, to try to kill one-eyed Islamist leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said the F-15E Strike Eagles were armed with precision 500-pound (230-kilogram) bombs as they attacked a target in eastern Libya.

Al-Qaida-linked jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who allegedly masterminded the siege of an Algerian gas plant in which 38 hostages died, has been killed in a U.S. air strike, Libya's internationally recognized government said.

"American jets conducted an operation which resulted in the deaths of Mokhtar Belmokhtar and a group of Libyans belonging to a terrorist organization in eastern Libya," said a statement posted on Facebook.

French President Francois Hollande heads to Algeria on Monday as the two nations, once bitter foes, work ever closer to resolve the political turmoil and jihadist threat in Mali and Libya.

The trip will be Hollande's second to Algiers since a 2012 visit during which he recognized France's century of "brutal" rule over the Algerian people which ended in a bloody independence war.

A year after Islamic State jihadists overran much of Iraq, the United States and its allies are struggling to turn the tide against the extremists and their self-declared "caliphate."

As it tries to lead an unwieldy international coalition, Washington has pleaded for patience but has yet to arrive at a successful formula that can cripple the well-funded, opportunistic jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

Libyan militiamen kidnapped 10 staffers from Tunisia's consulate in Tripoli Friday after storming the mission, the government in Tunis said.

A foreign ministry statement denounced "the intrusion of an armed group in the offices of the Tunisian consulate in Tripoli and the detention of 10 staff of the mission."

World powers urged Libya's warring factions at a meeting in Berlin to wrap up peace talks quickly, calling the current round of negotiations a "last chance" for progress.

Twenty-three Libyan envoys joined diplomats from the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council in the German capital and other Western nations at a meeting announced Tuesday by Bernardino Leon, chief of the U.N. Support Mission in Libya.

The U.S.-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the Islamic State group needs to target the jihadists' command centers, but this is easier said than done, French army chief Denis Mercier said Wednesday.

He compared operations in Iraq, where French warplanes are carrying out air strikes, and Syria, where the U.S. is bombing jihadist positions, to the 2011 international intervention in Libya.

Barack Obama's admission that he has an incomplete strategy to combat the Islamic State group is politically toxic, but history shows many of his predecessors also decided that "muddling through" a crisis was the least-worst option.

They were seven small words that did not help the 44th president one little bit after a G7 meeting in the clean air of the Bavarian Alps: "We don't yet have a complete strategy."