France saw an 18-percent rise in asylum requests in the first five months of the year, but numbers were down from a peak at the end of 2015, migration officials said Wednesday.

Pascal Brice, the head of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees (OFPRA), said France had counted 33,000 asylum requests between January and May, compared to 28,000 for the same period in 2015.

French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron was pelted with eggs by angry union activists Monday in a sign that labor tensions are even taking the shine off the country's most popular minister.

The 38-year-old former Rothschild banker regularly polls higher than France's deeply unpopular president and prime minister, and has recently been accused of harboring a desire to be president.

The international community committed Friday to try and push Israel and the Palestinians to resume peace talks under a French-led initiative, despite a decidedly lukewarm reaction from Washington and hostility from Israel.

Indirect peace talks between the two sides collapsed more than two years ago, and French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned that the diplomatic void meant the prospect of a two-state solution to the decades-long conflict was in "serious danger."

France on Friday called on Russia to pressure Syria to allow humanitarian aid to reach besieged areas, as the Security Council met to discuss plans for airdrops of food and medicine.

"The top priority is to get those who have influence over Damascus, starting with Russia, to strongly increase their pressure on the regime," French Ambassador Francois Delattre told reporters as he headed into the closed meeting.

Seven suspected jihadists, including the brother of one of the suicide bombers in last November's Paris attacks, went on trial in Paris on Monday.

The men, now aged between 24 and 27, traveled to Syria at the end of 2013 and returned to France a few months later. Arrested in May 2014, they all deny having fought as jihadists while there.

The police chief of Mayotte said Monday that he planned to crack down on clandestine immigration on the French Indian Ocean territory, where locals have forced hundreds of settlers out of their homes.

"We are pursuing the intensification of the fight against clandestine immigration," the newly appointed prefect of Mayotte, Frederic Veau, told a press conference.

Prosecutors said Friday they have opened an investigation into a massive brawl in the "Jungle" migrant camp in the northern French town of Calais that left 40 people injured.

A young female aid worker was among those seriously hurt after the fight broke out between some 200 Afghans and Sudanese on Thursday.

French police fired water cannon Wednesday to disperse scores of activists blocking a northeastern oil depot, as pumps ran dry and unions stepped up strikes in a bitter battle over labor reforms.

With a fifth of petrol stations in France running low, police moved in to break a blockade at the depot in Douchy-les-Mines near the Belgian border that had been in place since Thursday.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Saturday that no theory on the cause of the EgyptAir crash has been ruled out, after revelations of smoke in the cabin minutes before the disaster.

"At this time... all theories are being examined and none is favored," he told a news conference after meeting with around 100 relatives of passengers who were aboard the doomed A320 that left Paris early Thursday for Cairo with 66 people aboard.

They fled hardship and war only to find misery and squalor, but migrants who met a gruesome end in northern France hoping to reach England are finally getting a touch of dignity in death.

More than 30 people have perished since June last year in and around the vast, infamous camp known as the "Jungle" in northern French port of Calais, near the Channel Tunnel.