Four suspected al-Qaida members have been killed by army fire outside the southern Yemeni city of Zinjibar, most of which has fallen under the control of Islamist militants, a local official said Thursday.

The suspects were killed when their positions were hit by army shells in the villages of al-Khamla and Bajdar outside Zinjibar, the capital of the lawless Abyan province, the official told Agence France Presse requesting anonymity.

A group of people broke into Libya's embassy in Stockholm Thursday and at least one appeared to be threatening to jump from a window, police said, adding the break-in seemed to be part of a demonstration.

"A number of men have broken into the embassy, but there was no embassy personnel there," police spokesman Lennart Loefgren told Agence France Presse, adding it remained unclear how many people were inside the mission.

The Palestinians "strongly condemn" an Israeli decision to approve the construction of 1,600 new settler homes in east Jerusalem, a Palestinian official told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat denounced the Israeli interior ministry's announcement Thursday that it had given final approval for the construction of 1,600 homes in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, recovering in Riyadh from bomb blast wounds, said a Gulf proposal for power transfer which he averted signing in the past should be treated positively.

The embattled veteran leader, whose regime has been facing protests since January, said his ruling General People's Congress party stresses the need to "continue to deal positively with the Gulf initiative," Saba state news agency reported Thursday.

Israel's interior minister Eli Yishai has given final approval for the construction of 1,600 new settler homes in east Jerusalem, his spokesman told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

Roei Lachmanovich also said the interior minister was set to give final approval for another 2,700 settler homes in east Jerusalem neighborhoods in "a couple of days."

Khamis, the feared military commander and son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, was shown on state television on Wednesday, days after rebels reported his death.

Tripoli denied the claim at the time, but a rebel spokesman on Wednesday insisted that Khamis was dead.

Western nations stepped up demands for U.N. measures against President Bashar Assad after the Syrian leader ignored repeated calls for an end to the bloodshed in his country.

But U.N. Security Council battlelines were drawn when Russia's U.N. envoy said calls for sanctions did not help end the crackdown by Syrian security forces in which rights groups say more than 2,000 civilians have died.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad admitted Wednesday that his security forces had made "some mistakes" in battling protests, as he met with several U.N. Security Council members.

The deputy foreign ministers from the three emerging powers of Brazil, India and South Africa met Assad and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem in Damascus to call for an "immediate end to all violence" in Syria, a statement said.

The United States Wednesday again stopped short of explicitly calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to leave power, but said it would help his people achieve "dignity and freedom."

Washington further stiffened its stance, after a crackdown on protesters which has killed 2,000 people, by unveiling new sanctions on the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, the country's largest commercial bank.

Syrian security forces shot dead 16 people in the protest hub of Homs on Wednesday, activists said.

Security forces "fired indiscriminately on residents of the Baba Amro neighborhood, killing 11 people," an activist told Agence France Presse by telephone from the central city.