Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon stressed on Thursday that his country will not permit the transfer of weapons" from Syria to Hizbullah.”

Yaalon's statement came during talks he held with Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan, who arrived in Israel late on Thursday on a surprise visit to discuss the situation in Syria, an official Israeli source said.

Six Sahrawi activists arrested this month after pro-independence protests in Western Sahara said they were tortured by Moroccan police and made to sign confessions, Amnesty International charged on Thursday.

"According to the information received by Amnesty International, all six men told the investigative judge that they had been tortured and otherwise ill-treated and that their 'confessions' were extracted under torture in police custody," the rights group said.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to crank up pressure on Syria's President Bashar Assad Thursday, but offered no concrete new measures to do so.

Obama warned there was no "magic formula" to force Assad to leave power, as both the United States and Turkey want, but said he hoped a conference that Washington is organizing with Russia next month would be successful.

Yemen's near-forgotten humanitarian crisis could sink its Arab Spring political transition, with a new constitution and elections expected by next year, a senior United Nations aid official warned Thursday.

"In Yemen today, stability is threatened by the drastic humanitarian situation," said Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the U.N.'s Yemen aid coordinator.

French President Francois Hollande said Thursday that more efforts were needed to convince Moscow to drop its support for Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

"We must have a frank discussion with Russia to convince it that it is in its interests, in the interests of the region, in the interests of peace, to finish with Bashar Assad," Hollande told a press conference.

A suicide bomber attacked a Shiite place of worship, or husseiniyah, in the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk on Thursday, killing 12 people, a senior police officer said.

The bomber tried to enter Al-Zahraa husseiniyah, where family members of victims from violence the day before were receiving condolences, but was prevented by police from doing so, and detonated an explosives-rigged belt near the entrance instead.

Tunisia's hardline Salafist movement Ansar al-Sharia vowed on Thursday to go ahead with its annual congress at the weekend in defiance of a government ban on the controversial gathering.

"We are not asking permission from the government to preach the word of God and we warn against any police intervention to prevent the congress from taking place," spokesman Seifeddine Rais told a news conference in Tunis.

Angered over Bashar Assad's brutal repression of peaceful protests in Syria two years ago, Paris closed its embassy in Damascus, virtually cutting off the lifeline to the capital's once-thriving French school.

But tenacious parents and staff, driven by their love for French culture and despite financial hardship, have kept the Charles de Gaulle school open, and children continue to study their grammar despite encroaching war.

A suicide bomber attacked Shiite mourners in north Iraq Thursday, killing 12 people, and 13 died in other violence, officials said, as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed sectarianism for unrest plaguing the country.

The suicide bomber tried to enter Al-Zahraa husseiniyah, a Shiite place of worship in the city of Kirkuk, where relatives of victims from violence the day before were receiving condolences.

Iran on Thursday said a U.N. General Assembly vote condemning Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime over its "escalation" of the civil war will embolden "extremist groups" in Syria.

"Not only will (the U.N. condemnation) not help the problem there, but it will also escalate the actions and crimes of extremist groups in Syria," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Araqchi said in a statement carried by the Mehr news agency.