U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon called on Tuesday for "goodwill gestures" by Israel to encourage the Palestinians to revive the Middle East peace process, ahead of talks with leaders from the two sides.

Speaking after meeting with Jordanian leaders, Ban did not say what the gestures were, but he has been an outspoken critic of Israel's increased settlement in the occupied territories, which the Palestinians blame for the latest peace impasse.

Egyptian Bedouins on Tuesday captured 25 Chinese workers in Sinai to demand the release of relatives detained over bombings in the peninsula between 2004 and 2006, a security official said.

The Chinese nationals, technicians and engineers who work for a military-owned cement factory in the Lehfen area of central Sinai, were abducted on their way to work, the official said.

Kuwait's Islamist-led opposition appears headed for a key victory in this week's general election, described as crucial for the future of the oil-rich Gulf state.

The outcome of Thursday's ballot, the fourth in just under six years, is not expected to end political turmoil that has paralyzed development in OPEC's third largest oil producer, however.

Yemen's newly appointed Information Minister Ali Ahmed al-Amrani escaped an assassination attempt on Tuesday as he was leaving government headquarters in Sanaa, a government official told Agence France Presse.

"Three bullets targeted Amrani's car as he left the government headquarters following a cabinet meeting," the official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

Some 50 exiled members of the Iranian opposition and civil society will meet in Stockholm at the weekend to discuss how to help implement democracy in Iran, organizers said Tuesday.

The two-day conference "will gather leading representatives from different parts of the opposition outside the country as well as writers, activists and university professors outside Iran," the Olof Palme Center said in a statement.

Russia on Tuesday warned that passing a Western-backed U.N. resolution on Syria vehemently opposed by Moscow would risk paving the way towards civil war in the country.

"The Western draft of the Security Council's resolution on Syria will not help in the search for a compromise," Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov wrote on his Twitter account.

Security forces have detained 16 of Tareq al-Hashemi's bodyguards, Iraq's interior ministry said, in a move the fugitive vice president said Tuesday was nothing new in a series of false accusations.

Hashemi is hiding in the autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq after being accused in mid-December of running a death squad.

The Tel Aviv District Attorney's office on Tuesday filed charges against an Arab-Israeli couple for keeping their daughter locked up for nine years.

Details of the indictment served at the Petah Tikva District Court said the father and stepmother of the 20-year-old woman kept her locked in a bathroom or other small rooms in three different houses across the West Bank.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon urged the Security Council to take action on Tuesday to "bear quick fruit" to end the crackdown on dissent in Syria, where more than 5,400 people have been killed.

"I hope the U.N. Security Council meeting will bear quick fruit so that the council can meet the expectations of the international community," Ban told a news conference with Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh in Amman.

Syrian security forces on Tuesday killed at least 27 civilians, including two children, and five army deserters across the country, according to activists, as the rebel army said the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad no longer controls half of the country's territory.

Fourteen people were killed in the flashpoint northwestern province of Idlib, eleven in the central protest hub of Homs, four in the capital Damascus and its suburbs, and three in the southern province of Daraa, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.