Violence in the Syria conflict has become openly sectarian and threatens whole communities, U.N. investigators reported Thursday following a visit to the region.

"As battles between government forces and anti-government armed groups approach the end of their second year, the conflict has become overtly sectarian in nature," the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a report.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a key figure who has long sought to bridge political and sectarian divides in his war-scarred country, arrived in Germany on Thursday for treatment after he suffered a stroke.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Talabani, 79, was in the country for medical care.

The scandal over the Benghazi attack grew Wednesday as a top State Department official resigned and three others were suspended when a probe uncovered major security failures and mismanagement.

The news came amid a clamor of calls for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify to U.S. lawmakers about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, after ill-health forced her to pull out of this week's hearings.

Yemeni President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi announced on Wednesday the restructuring of the army and defense ministry, purging them of relatives and cronies of former head of state Ali Abdullah Saleh, state television said.

Hadi took a series of decisions, including one scrapping the elite Republican Guard which was under the command of Saleh's oldest son Ahmed, the state broadcaster said.

More than 44,000 people have been killed in Syria since the outbreak in March 2011 of an anti-regime revolt that became a bloody insurgency after a brutal crackdown, a rights group said on Wednesday.

"At least 44,063 people have been killed in 21 months," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Egypt's ousted president Hosni Mubarak was transferred to a Cairo military hospital on Wednesday, after slipping and injuring his head and chest in prison, a security official said.

For months, there have been conflicting reports about the health of the 84-year old Mubarak, who was sentenced in June to life in prison for failing to stop the killing of hundreds of protesters during last year's uprising. He is the first Arab president to serve a prison sentence.

French President Francois Hollande said on Wednesday that he had not come to Algeria to offer "apologies" for crimes committed during the colonial period.

"I have not come here... to offer repentance or apologies. I have come to say what is true," Hollande told a news conference in Algiers, on the first day of his landmark visit to the former French colony.

The United Nations on Wednesday called on Israel to cancel plans to build thousands of new settler homes in the occupied Palestinian territories, warning it could be "an almost fatal blow" to peace hopes.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon's political chief also told the U.N. Security Council that Israel must resume the transfer of frozen tax and customs money to the struggling Palestinian Authority "without delay."

As many as 100,000 Palestinians may have fled a Damascus refugee camp after deadly clashes there, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said Wednesday.

"People are still leaving in droves," UNRWA deputy chief of staff Lisa Gilliam told AFP, adding that the organization estimated that around two thirds of the some 150,000 residents of Yarmuk camp appeared to have left.

Israel on Wednesday issued tenders to build another 1,048 settler homes in annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, housing ministry spokesman Ariel Rosenberg told AFP.

Rosenberg said an unspecified number of homes would go up in the east Jerusalem settlement suburb of Har Homa, but construction would be "mainly in Beitar, Karnei Shomron, Givat Zeev and Efrat," in the West Bank.