Military leaders from the rebel-held Libyan city of Misrata asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday for extra aid to defeat ruler Moammar Gadhafi, a member of their delegation said.

"Insurgent commanders came to explain to the head of state that the keys to Tripoli are in Misrata because Misrata's fighters are disciplined, battle hardened and they have a key asset: a military victory already won" against forces loyal to Gadhafi, Bernard-Henri Levy told Agence France Presse after the meeting.

Syria has apologized to Qatar for an attack by demonstrators on its embassy in Damascus that prompted it to suspend work in the strife-torn country, an official in Doha said on Wednesday.

"Syria has sent a letter of apology to the Qatari ministry of foreign affairs," the Qatari official said on condition of anonymity.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem warned the French and U.S. ambassadors on Wednesday not to travel outside Damascus without permission from the authorities, after they both visited the flashpoint central city of Hama earlier this month.

"We will impose a ban on any (diplomatic) travel more than 25 kilometers outside Damascus, if the ambassadors continue to ignore (our) guidance," Muallem told the envoys at a meeting broadcast by state television.

Former U.N. nuclear watchdog Chief Mohamed ElBaradei is the most popular choice for next Egyptian president, according to an army survey conducted on Facebook, state media reported on Wednesday.

The survey, which was launched a month ago on Facebook, asked members to rate their favorite for the country's top job, in an exercise criticized as unrepresentative.

A United Arab Emirates (UAE) fighter plane has crashed on a training mission, killing its pilot, the official WAM news agency reported on Wednesday.

"The general command of the UAE Armed Forces today announced the crash of a fighter aircraft of the United Arab Emirates Air Force and Air Defense and the death of its pilot, First Lieutenant Pilot Suhail Mubarak Abdullah Al Dhahiri," WAM said.

Yemen's opposition is to form a coalition to unite its various strands ahead of the return of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is hospitalized in Saudi Arabia, a spokesman said Wednesday.

A preparatory committee on Tuesday night approved the creation of a "national coalition council," Ahmed al-Sabri, the spokesman for the committee, told Agence France Presse.

Israel is willing to hold peace talks with the Palestinians immediately, in Jerusalem or even Ramallah, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in excerpts of an interview released on Wednesday.

Speaking to Arabic-language television station al-Arabiya, Netanyahu also denied that Israel wanted to see Syrian President Bashar Assad remain in power, and acknowledged that he had held secret peace talks with Damascus in the past.

France accepts Moammar Gadhafi could stay in Libya if he quits politics, under a ceasefire deal to end a conflict with rebels backed by Paris, the French foreign minister said on Wednesday.

"One of the possibilities being considered is that he stay in Libya but on the clear condition that he steps aside from Libyan political life," the minister, Alain Juppe, told LCI television.

The Israeli air force carried out a raid on the Gaza Strip early Wednesday in retaliation for Palestinian rocket attacks, a military spokeswoman said.

Warplanes attacked "a target situated in the north of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for rockets fired in the past few days against Israeli territory", she told Agence France Presse.

Egypt's ousted president Hosni Mubarak's health is stable, but he has an abnormal heart rhythm and sometimes falls unconscious, the official MENA news agency reported on Tuesday.

The ex-president, 83, is under arrest on murder and corruption charges in a hospital in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.