Libya has dropped arrest warrants and travel bans slapped by the toppled regime of Moammar Gadhafi against the slain dictator's opponents, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP on Wednesday.

"All arrest warrants and travel bans issued by the former regime against Gadhafi's opponents have been lifted," Mejdi al-Orfi said.

Butcher Sherzad Saleh stands outside his shop in Tuz Khurmatu holding a dead chicken. He has more pressing concerns than a high-level dispute over territory.

"The army comes here, this is my job; the peshmerga come here, this is my job," says Saleh.

Two Jordanian peacekeepers have been freed after 136 days of captivity in Sudan's Darfur region, the African Union-U.N. mission to the troubled region said on Wednesday.

"They are safe," UNAMID spokeswoman Aicha Elbasri told Agence France Presse. "This is the longest hostage-taking incident (for UNAMID)."

An air raid on a town partly held by rebels on the outskirts of Damascus on Wednesday killed at least 12 members of the same family, most of them children, a watchdog said.

Regime warplanes bombed the town of Moadamiyet al-Sham, southwest of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

An Australian citizen fighting with Syrian rebels in their battle against President Bashar Assad's regime has been killed in the northwest of the country, a watchdog said on Wednesday.

"Abu al-Walid al-Australi was killed December 30 in a rebel assault on the Wadi Deif base," Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Agence France Presse.

The militant Islamic Hamas could wrest the West Bank from the western-backed rule of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, just as it did in the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

"Everyone knows that Hamas could take over the Palestinian Authority," a statement from Netanyahu's office quoted him as telling members of a Jewish bible study circle meeting at his Jerusalem residence.

Algerian troops killed seven armed Islamists early Tuesday in a raid in the Boumerdes region east of the capital during which they also seized arms and ammunition, the defense ministry said.

The operation targeted members of a "dangerous" group in the Boulezazen region of Boumerdes some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Algiers, the ministry said in a statement carried by the APS news agency.

Israeli troops wounded dozens of Palestinians in clashes in a West Bank village on Tuesday after the discovery of a small commando force disguised as Arabs brought a crowd of stone-throwing villagers onto the streets, Palestinians said.

Palestinian security sources told AFP 30 people in Tamoun village were lightly injured by rubber bullets and one was moderately wounded when a live round hit his hand, while dozens more suffered from tear gas inhalation.

A group of some 20 Syrian soldiers including a general defected from the army Tuesday and fled to Turkey, joining hundreds of other ex-troops from Syria's military, a Turkish diplomat told Agence France Presse.

"The soldiers who fled to Turkey include a general, three colonels and several other officers," the source said on condition of anonymity.

Iraqi premier Nuri al-Maliki looked to head off protests in Sunni areas of the country on Tuesday with a prisoner release even as he threatened to use state resources to "intervene" to end the rallies.

The move came as powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr voiced support for the demonstrations and predicted an impending "Iraqi spring" as ongoing rallies blocked off a key trade route connecting Iraq to Syria and Jordan for a 10th successive day.