Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks with a prominent Kurdish lawmaker in a rare meeting Saturday to try and resolve a decades-old separatist conflict.

No statement was issued to the press after the one-and-a-half hour meeting which followed Leyla Zana's comments in a recent newspaper interview praising Erdogan as the head of the strongest government in Turkey's history.

A planned meeting on Sunday between Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israel's vice prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, has been called off, a senior Palestinian official said.

"The meeting between president Abbas and Shaul Mofaz has been postponed to a later date," the official in the West Bank city of Ramallah told Agence France Presse on Saturday, without giving a reason or a new date.

The Palestine Liberation Organization called on Saturday for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on Israel's policy of building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

"The PLO executive committee has decided to call for the Security Council to convene an urgent meeting to discuss settlements," the committee said after a meeting in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah.

Mohammed Morsi took the oath of office on Saturday to become Egypt's first Islamist president and its first elected head of state since Hosni Mubarak's overthrow last year.

The ceremony took place in the constitutional court rather than parliament, the result of an ongoing tussle with the military that took charge after Mubarak's overthrow and insists on retaining broad powers now.

World powers agreed Saturday to a plan for a transition in Syria that could include current regime members, but envoy Kofi Annan doubted if Syrians would pick leaders "with blood on their hands".

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear that Washington did not see any role for President Bashar Assad in the new regime, even though there was no explicit call for him to cede power.

More than 50 civilians and 23 military personnel have been killed by mines sown by al-Qaida since the militants were chased out of areas of south Yemen on June 13, the defense ministry reported on Saturday.

"More than 50 citizens have been killed by mines planted by the terrorists before they fled Zinjibar, Jaar and other localities" in Abyan province, ministry website 26sept.net reported, citing the province's deputy governor.

Egypt has seized a large weapons consignment, including Grad rockets, that had been smuggled from Libya and could have been headed to the Gaza Strip, press reports said on Saturday.

The haul, which included 138 Grad rockets and a further 139 Grad warheads, was made in the Mediterranean coastal town of Marsa Matruh, not far from the Libyan border, Egyptian newspapers reported.

At least 53 people were killed, mostly civilians, in violence across Syria on Saturday, and hundreds more were trapped in Douma as regime forces stormed the town in Damascus province, monitors said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights urged the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to "urgently send medical teams" to Douma.

Russia said it was looking with optimism at Saturday's Syria crisis talks in Geneva after being told by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Syrians themselves should decide the makeup of their new government.

"I can confidently say that we have a very good chance tomorrow in Geneva to find a common denominator and mark a path forward," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after the talks, adding that Clinton had agreed the Syrian governing lineup "can only be decided by the Syrians themselves."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that a decision by UNESCO to grant world heritage status to the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank city of Bethlehem proved the U.N. cultural organization was motivated by politics.

"This decision proves that UNESCO is motivated by political motives, not cultural ones," Netanyahu said in a statement.