EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Thursday the Palestinians' announcement that they were ending informal talks with Israel does not mean the two sides have reached an "impasse."

"I do not think there is an impasse. I know that President (Mahmoud) Abbas is thinking carefully about how to move forward. For him the meeting of the Arab (League) Follow up Committee in Cairo is extremely important," Ashton told reporters after meeting with Abbas in Amman.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani are to head to New York on Saturday to seek support for an Arab plan on Syria, Arabi said.

The two will "hold a meeting with the U.N. Security Council on Monday to seek ratification of the Arab League decision on Syria," for President Bashar Assad to hand power to his deputy, Arabi said.

A Bahraini protester detained following clashes with police in a Shiite village has died in hospital, police said on Thursday, as the opposition accused security forces of running him over.

An Interior Ministry statement posted on Twitter said that police arrested the man in the Gulf kingdom's central governorate on Tuesday "over acts of vandalism in the area of Sitra".

A Jordanian political activist was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison for undermining King Abdullah II's dignity, after he set alight a picture of the monarch this month.

"The (military) state security court sentenced Uday Abu Issa, 18, to two years in jail. He has been found guilty of undermining the king's dignity," a judicial official told Agence France Presse.

An Iranian U.S.-manufactured F-14 fighter jet crashed early on Thursday minutes after takeoff killing both crew, the Fars news agency reported.

"The pilot and the co-pilot of an F-14 plane that crashed this morning have been martyred," the news agency quoted the governor of Bushehr province on the Gulf coast, Jafar Pourkabgani, as saying.

Syrian security forces killed 49 civilians, including 10 children, in clashes across the country on Thursday, a rights group said.

"The toll for the day has risen to 49 civilians killed by the security forces in several regions of Syria, mostly in Homs," in the centre of the country, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Kuwait's public prosecutor has ordered 61 stateless men be detained for three weeks pending a probe into their alleged involvement in protests that turned violent, their lawyer said Thursday.

The men were arrested in mid-January when riot police cracked down on thousands of stateless protesters who were demanding the right to Kuwaiti citizenship and a host of basic rights.

Bomb attacks in Iraq on Thursday killed 13 people, including 10 who died in a bomb attack on the home of two brothers who were policemen, medics and police said.

The violence is the latest in a spate of unrest in the weeks since U.S. forces completed their withdrawal on December 18, with Iraq mired in a political stand-off that has pitted the Shiite-led government against the main Sunni-backed political bloc.

Bahraini police and anti-government protesters clashed in Shiite villages, leaving dozens of officers and several demonstrators injured, officials and the opposition said Wednesday, as a Bahraini court ruled that King Hamad acted lawfully when he declared a quasi state of emergency in March ahead of a crackdown on Shiite-led democracy protests.

The interior ministry accused protesters of "orchestrated attacks on police forces ... across the kingdom" that caused "significant injuries" to 41 officers, two of them requiring "critical care" at Bahrain's military hospital.

The Syrian regime and opposition on Wednesday traded blame for the killing of a Christian cleric and a regional Syrian Red Crescent chief.

An "armed terrorist group" killed a priest in the protest hub of Hama in central Syria on Wednesday, state media said, as regime forces reportedly pounded the city for a second day.