Suspected al-Qaida militants have kidnapped a Swiss woman and are holding her in the southeastern province of Shabwa, a provincial official told Agence France Presse on Friday.

"A Swiss woman was abducted in Hodeida (on the Red Sea coast) by armed men who moved her to Shabwa province," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Thousands of anti-regime protesters called on Friday for foreign military intervention to bring down a Syrian government whose brutal crackdown on dissent monitors say has cost more than 9,100 lives.

The protests after Muslim weekly prayers were called by activists on their Facebook page, Syrian Revolution 2011, to demand "immediate military intervention by the Arabs and Muslims, followed by the rest of the world."

Two British journalists who were detained by a Libyan militia last month will be released within 24 hours, a senior government official told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

"The two journalists will be released within 24 hours and will be free to leave the country," deputy interior minister Omar al-Khadrawi said.

Several hundred people including key figures in the opposition Syrian National Council rallied in Paris Thursday to mark the anniversary of Syria's revolt and denounce President Bashar al-Assad.

"Long live a free Syria!" the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, told the crowd gathered outside Paris city hall. "The suffering, the horror that this people have been living through for a year is unsustainable."

Syrian security forces killed at least 32 people on Thursday as the bodies of 23 torture victims were found near the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria that security forces captured earlier this week, activists said.

"Twenty-three bodies with marks of extreme torture were found near Mazraat Wadi Khaled, west of the city of Idlib," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in a statement.

Senior Gaza-based Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar pledged that the "principles and strategy of the Palestinian Islamic resistance will not change," during a visit to Tehran on Thursday, Iranian media reported.

Zahar, who is meeting Iranian officials, arrived in Tehran shortly after a fragile truce between Israel and Gaza-based militants was announced, ending four days of bloodshed.

A majority of Israel's security cabinet now supports an attack on Iran in a bid to end its nuclear program, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday, citing political sources it did not identify.

Writing in the Maariv daily, influential columnist Ben Caspit said most of the 14-member security cabinet was now leaning in favor of a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, a move which he said was supported by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

U.S. congressional minority leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday dismissed a row with Egypt over the trial of American democracy activists as a road bump in strong bilateral ties, as she visited Cairo.

The Democrat former speaker led a house delegation that met military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and parliamentarians, after Egypt defused a crisis with the U.S. by allowing the NGO activists to leave the country.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan remains in contact with Syrian authorities, a spokesman for his office said Thursday, on the eve of a scheduled videoconference from Geneva with the Security Council.

Annan was to hold the videoconference with the U.N. in New York as part of a "closed briefing" of the Security Council, spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told Agence France Presse.

The Egyptian foreign ministry said Thursday it was in talks with Tripoli over a request to hand back members of slain leader Moammar Gadhafi’s regime seeking refuge in Egypt.

Libya's prosecutor had written to his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, providing a list of Libyans in Egypt belonging to the former regime who are wanted back home.