U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday urged Israel and the Palestinians to take "bold action" to end the Middle East conflict while also scolding U.S. lawmakers for blocking aid to the Palestinians.

"There is a need and an opportunity for bold action on both sides to move towards a negotiated two-state solution," Panetta told a joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Moammar Gadhafi's birthplace Qasr Abu Hadi has been overrun by fighters loyal to Libya's new rulers, according to medics who visited the village Monday on the edge of the Mediterranean city of Sirte.

"Abu Hadi is completely free (of Gadhafi fighters)," said Dr. Taha Sultan at a field hospital on the eastern outskirts of Sirte.

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza staged demonstrations on Monday in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails.

The rallies were called five days after the inmates went on hunger strike to protest against the solitary confinement of some of their fellow prisoners, including a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Libya's post-Gadhafi leaders have named a new Cabinet and vow to step down after the country is fully secured.

Monday's announcement comes after weeks of political infighting stalled efforts to form a new government.

Syrian troops going house to house have detained more than 3,000 people in the past three days in a rebellious town that government forces recently retook in some of the worst fighting since the country's uprising began six months ago, an activist said Monday.

Also, a member of Syria's outgoing parliament dismissed a broad-based national council set up by the opposition, saying it will not be able to overthrow President Bashar Assad's regime. Khaled Abboud told The Associated Press that those who announced the formation of the council in Istanbul a day earlier are "deluding themselves."

Gunmen linked to al-Qaida on Monday killed four soldiers in southern Yemen, a medic said, a day after at least 25 troops died in an air strike by government forces and other gunbattles.

Another four soldiers who were wounded in the latest clashes in the city of Zinjibar were in "serious condition," said the medic at a military hospital in Aden.

A group of Bahraini medics handed lengthy jail terms by a security court for trying to overthrow the regime will appeal their sentences in a civil court later this month, the prosecutor general has said.

"A session has been set for October 23 to look into the appeals," chief prosecutor Abdulrahman al-Sayyed said in a statement carried overnight by the official BNA news agency.

Iraqi forces retook control of a police headquarters in western Iraq on Monday after armed insurgents stormed it and took hostages in a two-hour siege that left the town's police chief dead.

Gunmen set off at least two explosions at around 10:00 am (07:00 GMT) before overrunning theal-Baghdadi police headquarters, which is in a compound that also houses the office of the town's mayor.

Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun’s son and history professor Mohammed al-Omar were killed on Sunday by “gunfire from a group of armed terrorists,” Syria's state news agency SANA reported.

Saria Hassoun and al-Omar were attacked while traveling in the professor's car on the Aleppo-Idlib road in northwest Syria, it said, after having earlier reported that the grand mufti's son was injured and was admitted to Idleb National Hospital.

Vandals torched a mosque in northern Israel in a suspected revenge attack by right-wing extremists that sparked a "furious" response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

The mosque, located in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria in the northern Galilee region, sustained heavy damage in the overnight attack, in which the arsonists scrawled the words "tag" and "revenge" on the walls.