Syria's security forces shot dead 30 people Friday, a Syrian human rights activist told the AP, as thousands rallied on a "Day of Defiance" against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad after tanks converged on protest centers.

At the same time, "armed criminal gangs" killed one officer and four policemen, state news agency SANA said.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told a mass rally of supporters on Friday that he would resist calls to quit, describing as "outlaws" tens of thousands of protesters gathered a short distance away.

"I can assure you that I will resist," Saleh told the crowd in the capital Sanaa's Sabbine Square after taking part in the main weekly Muslim prayers at nearby Tahrir Square.

France has ordered 14 people who served as Libyan diplomats under Moammer Gadhafi's regime to leave the country within two days, the French foreign ministry said on Friday.

"France has declared persona non grata 14 Libyan ex-diplomats posted in France," the ministry said in a statement, indicating that Paris no longer recognized their diplomatic status.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday after talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy that France wants the new Palestinian government to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

"What I heard from President Sarkozy is that they must recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people," Netanyahu said outside the Elysee Palace in Paris, after a meeting he described as "good, far-ranging and friendly".

A ceasefire in the Libyan conflict could be reached within weeks, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Thursday following a meeting of the international contact group on Libya.

"A few weeks is a realistic period" to secure a truce, Frattini said on Radio Uno in reply to a question.

Dozens of armored vehicles, including tanks and troops reinforcements, were deployed Thursday near the Syrian coastal town of Banias, an activist told Agence France Presse, contacted by telephone.

"It looks like they are preparing to attack the town, like they did in Daraa," the flashpoint town where the protest movement was born, he said.

An Arab summit that had been due to be held in Baghdad next week has been postponed until March 2012, the Arab League chief and Iraq's foreign minister said Thursday, after Gulf calls for a cancelation.

"It has been decided to postpone the Baghdad summit until March 2012 at the request of the Republic of Iraq which will retain the right to host the (next) summit," said a statement released by the 22-nation bloc after talks between its secretary general Amr Moussa and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

Syrian troops arrested 300 people in a Damascus suburb on Thursday even as they pulled back from the protest hub of Daraa after a military lockdown of more than a week.

Activists, meanwhile, vowed a "Day of Defiance" on Friday to press a seven-week-old anti-regime campaign in which 607 people have been killed, according to human rights groups, while 8,000 people have been jailed or gone missing.

The United States and Italy called for an immediate end to the crackdown in Syria on Thursday and warned about the rising influence of Iran amid the multiple crises shaking the Arab world, Agence France Presse reported.

"The Syrian government must immediately stop the violence and resume a path of dialogue with those who want reform," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said at a joint news conference with Clinton in Rome.

A court sentenced former Egyptian interior minister Habib al-Adly to 12 years for corruption on Thursday in the first trial of an official from the regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak.

Adly, who ran Mubarak's security services for more than a decade before the strongman's overthrow in February in the face of 18 straight days of mass protests, was convicted of money-laundering and illicitly enriching himself while in office.