Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday nominated a Revolutionary Guards commander targeted by international sanctions, Rostam Qasemi, to head the strategic oil ministry, reports said.

Brigadier General Qasemi heads the sanctions-hit industrial wing of the elite Guards, Khatam al-Anbiya, which is massively present in the Islamic republic's oil sector.

Parties to Libya's crisis remain deeply divided on how to end the conflict that has raged since an uprising against the regime erupted in February, U.N. special envoy Abdul Ilah al-Khatib said.

Khatib this week visited the rebel capital Benghazi in Libya's east as well as the capital Tripoli, where veteran strongman Moammar Gadhafi has his headquarters.

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Tuesday called on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to resign, directing his message to the Arab world in his first news conference for Arab media.

Peres also voiced respect for Syrian demonstrators who he said "are fighting for peace and who want to live like human beings."

An al-Qaida militant has been killed together with his two children when a car bomb he was making at his home exploded near the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk, police said on Tuesday.

"An al-Qaida terrorist, Mohammed Nussayef Jasim al-Hamdani, was killed while trying to fit a bomb inside a vehicle at his home," a police official in Kirkuk said.

Turkey is preparing to harden its attitude towards Israel for its refusal to apologize over last year's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, official sources said on Tuesday.

The Israeli government has to date failed to either say sorry or compensate families of the nine activists who were killed in May last year in a commando raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-owned ferry which was leading the convoy.

Seventy-eight people were killed and three injured Tuesday when a Moroccan military plane slammed into a mountainside in bad weather in the country's south, the Moroccan military said.

The Hercules C-130 aircraft crashed into a mountain 10 kilometers northeast of Guelmim, located about 830 kilometers south of Rabat, an army statement said.

Clashes broke out on Tuesday between workers at an industrial free zone in the Egyptian canal city of Ismailiya and military police in which 38 people were injured, witnesses and medics told Agence France Presse.

At least 5,000 workers from the Ismailiya Public Free Zone, where 80 factories produce textiles and leather, had tried to leave the industrial compound where they have been striking and were blocked by military police, witnesses said.

Security forces have killed another three people and arrested so many that Syria has become a "huge prison," activists said on Tuesday, as the crackdown on dissent shows no signs of easing.

Two men and a woman were shot dead on Monday in separate incidents in and around the flashpoint central city of Homs and in the northwestern city of Idlib, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Twelve suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in overnight bombings and clashes near Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province in south Yemen, a military officer and a local official said on Tuesday.

"The Yemeni air force carried out a number of strikes on al-Khamila south of Zinjibar where al-Qaida members were hiding ... killing seven and wounding others," the military officer said, adding that various pieces of equipment belonging to the jihadists were also destroyed.

Palestinian premier Salam Fayyad will urge Arab nations to deliver pledged aid at a meeting of the Arab League on Tuesday to discuss the Palestinian Authority's financial crisis.

Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki told Agence France Presse that the meeting at the Arab League's Cairo headquarters had been convened at the request of president Mahmud Abbas.