Two U.S. warships carrying marines and equipment entered the Suez Canal on Wednesday en route to Libya, as the United States and Europe piled pressure on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

"The USS Kearsarge and the USS Ponce entered the Suez Canal from the southern entrance at 6:00 am (0400 GMT) and are making their way to the Mediterranean Sea," a canal authority official said.

The United Nations on Tuesday suspended Libya from its main human rights body over Moammar Gadhafi's crackdown on protests as the Security Council warned of new action against his regime.

Britain's U.N. envoy said the council would take "whatever measures we consider necessary to respond to events on the ground."

Frederick Hof, the assistant of U.S. Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell, visited Damascus lately and discussed with Syrian officials the Syrian-Israeli peace track, An-Nahar reported Wednesday.

Israel's defense minister said Monday that his country would be ready to talk peace with Syria if Damascus was serious about doing so — a sharp departure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's go-slow approach to peacemaking while the Middle East is in turmoil.

U.S. defense leaders played down the likelihood of imposing a no-fly zone on Libya, urging a cautious approach to any military action against Moammer Gadhafi's forces.

The U.S. military's top officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on Tuesday a no-fly zone would be "extraordinarily complex" to carry out while a top general warned there should be "no illusions" about what it would take to shut down the Libyan leader's air force.

Tanks dispersed demonstrators blocking the port in the industrial city of Sohar and the coast road to Muscat on Tuesday as protests were also reported elsewhere in Oman, Agence France Presse journalists and witnesses said.

The operation went peacefully and Omani forces drove away protesters who had been keeping vigil at the Earth Roundabout, a landmark intersection where at least one protester was killed in clashes on Sunday.

Enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya would first require bombing the north African nation's air defense systems, top U.S. commander General James Mattis warned Tuesday.

A no-fly zone would require removing "the air defense capability first," Mattis, the head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing.

The European Union on Tuesday called a crisis summit of its 27 leaders next week to seek a joint response in facing the turmoil both in Libya and in Arab states on Europe's southern flank.

"In light of developments in the EU's southern neighborhood, and especially in Libya, I convened an extraordinary European Council (or summit) on 11/03," EU president Herman Van Rompuy said Tuesday on his Twitter webpage.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is a "living political corpse" who has no place in the civilized world and must quit power, the Interfax news agency quoted a Kremlin source as saying Tuesday.

"We believe that even if Gadhafi now manages to dig himself in, he is a living political corpse who has no place in the modern civilized world," the source said in Russia's first clear call for the Libyan leader to quit.

Iran denied that authorities have jailed opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi at a Tehran prison as repeatedly claimed by their family members.

"The published news by some hostile media regarding the transfer of Mr. Mousavi and Mr. Karroubi to Heshmatiyeh detention centre is false," Iran's prosecutor general Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie told the ISNA news agency on Tuesday.

Vast numbers of protesters poured into a square in Yemen's capital Sanaa Tuesday for a massive anti-regime rally, as President Ali Abdullah Saleh blamed the U.S. and Israel for a wave of Arab revolts.

Protesters crowded three streets leading to a square near Sanaa University, where students and pro-democracy demonstrators have been camped for more than a week.