An Israeli court on Monday found two policemen guilty of negligent homicide after they dumped an injured Palestinian prisoner at the side of a West Bank road and left him to die, legal documents showed.

"By setting down the deceased in the condition and under the circumstances which they did, the accused breached their duty of care toward the deceased," Jerusalem magistrate Haim Liran wrote in his ruling, a copy of which was obtained by Agence France Presse.

The United Nations, not Syria, must investigate the Houla massacre, Human Rights Watch said adding that witness testimony suggest government forces were responsible for the carnage.

"Kofi Annan should push Syria's government to allow the U.N.-appointed Commission of Inquiry access into the country to investigate," the massacre in which at least 108 people were killed, including 49 children.

Air raids, including by U.S. drones, and clashes in Yemen have killed at least 17 al-Qaida militants and a civilian, officials and tribesmen said on Monday.

Five militants of al-Qaida were killed when they were hit by a U.S. drone on Monday, a tribal source told Agence France Presse.

Syria's leaders will have to answer for their "murderous folly", the French president's office said Monday, a day after the U.N. Security Council condemned the slaughter of civilians there, as the opposition Syrian National Council urged countries that support the revolt to honor their promises by helping Syrians defend themselves.

"The Houla massacre and the events of these last days in Syria and in Lebanon illustrate, once more, the danger of Bashar Assad's regime's actions for the Syrian people," said a statement.

A fire that erupted on Monday at a nursery in a main shopping center in the Qatari capital killed 19 people including 13 children, the interior ministry said.

Four of the children who died were Spanish, said a foreign ministry spokeswoman in Madrid.

Egypt's landmark presidential election on Monday narrowed to a contest pitting a Muslim Brotherhood candidate against a Mubarak-era prime minister, the country's electoral commission said.

Announcing the results, commission chief Farouq Sultan said: "No candidate won an outright majority, so according to Article 40 of the presidential election law, there will be a run-off between Mohammed Mursi and Ahmed Shafiq."

Seif al-Islam, the son of Libya's slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi, has not been transferred to Tripoli because the ex-rebels holding him have not been paid, Libya's envoy to the International Criminal Court said on Monday.

"The failure of the National Transitional Council to fulfill its promise to pay the salaries of the thuwar (revolutionaries) of Zintan for six months' work, for an amount of not more than 1.7 million dinars ($1.36 million), led them to cancel Seif al-Islam's transfer to prison in Tripoli," Ahmed al-Jehani told Agence France Presse.

Israel expects foreign diplomatic pressure on Turkey to stop it trying four Israeli commanders over the killing of nine Turkish activists in a 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound ship.

"I imagine that diplomatic pressure will be put on Turkey to withdraw this action... foreign not Israeli," deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, told state-run Channel One TV on Monday.

World inaction after the killing of more than 100 people, half of them children, in the Syrian town of Houla at the weekend will only encourage Damascus to commit more massacres, Tunisia said Monday.

"Tunisia firmly condemns this horrific carnage and reiterates its call on the international community to give Syria the attention it deserves," said a statement from President Moncef Marzouki's office.

Violence raged on Monday across Syria, where 25 people, most of them regime forces, were reportedly killed as clashes broke out in several restive provinces, monitors said.

The deadly violence came even as U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan arrived in Damascus to try and salvage a battered ceasefire, a day after monitors reported 90 people killed in Syria, more than a third in the city of Hama.