Deadly fighting raged between armed tribesmen and security forces on the streets of Sanaa Thursday, sending thousands of residents fleeing and closing the Yemeni capital's airport, witnesses said.

Medics said bodies were lying in the streets of al-Hasaba neighborhood, bastion of powerful tribal leader Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, where the fighting erupted on Tuesday after a truce broke down.

France is ready to host a Middle East peace conference before the end of July to help re-launch stalled negotiations, France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Thursday.

Speaking in Ramallah, Juppe warned that the current stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians was "untenable" and said France was willing to transform a July meeting of international donors into a broader peace conference.

Protesters, armed for the first time since demonstrations began in January, clashed Thursday with security forces in the flashpoint city of Taez, witnesses told Agence France Presse.

Witnesses said the clashes took place near the presidential palace and near a post held by the Republican Guard, an elite army unit loyal to embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh and led by his son Ahmed.

Six Israeli police officers and five settlers were injured early Tuesday morning in violent clashes that erupted as police dismantled an illegal settlement outpost, a police spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Police moved in to the Ali Ayan outpost in the West Bank north of Ramallah in the early hours of Tuesday morning, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Syrian opposition groups insisted on regime change as they met in Turkey on Wednesday, a day after President Bashar Assad decreed an amnesty for political prisoners following two months of bloodshed.

The three-day gathering -- titled "Conference for Change in Syria" -- opened with the Syrian national anthem and a minute of silence for "the martyrs" killed in bloody crackdowns on street protests simmering in Syria since March.

A U.N. panel on Wednesday accused Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's regime of carrying out systematic attacks on the population, saying that it committed not only war crimes but also crimes against humanity.

While it found fewer reports of violations by the opposition, the commission of inquiry set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council also found that rebel forces committed acts that constituted war crimes.

Libyan Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem announced Wednesday in Italy that he had resigned and left Libya to join the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi "to fight for a democratic country."

"I can't work in this situation so I have left my country and my job to join the choice made by young Libyans to fight for a democratic country," he told journalists, following weeks of rumors and denials about his defection.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Wednesday launched a "national dialogue" while freeing hundreds of political prisoners in an amnesty opposition groups and Washington say does not go far enough.

State television said Assad had set up a committee and charged it with "formulating general principles of dialogue that will open the way for the creation of an appropriate climate in which the different elements can express themselves and present their proposals."

Gunbattles raged Wednesday on the streets of Yemen's capital, killing 39 people, witnesses said as a truce between security forces and tribesmen collapsed, residents fled and embassies bolted their doors.

A medic at Jumhuriya hospital said 37 people, most of them combatants, were killed in overnight clashes in Sanaa, while an Agence France Presse photographer said the bodies of two other tribesmen were taken to Al-Ulum hospital during the day.

Britain believes that Syria should be reported to the U.N. Security Council over its alleged illicit nuclear activity, Britain's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Wednesday.

In a restricted report circulated to member states last week, the U.N. watchdog said it was "very likely" that a remote desert site in Syria bombed by Israeli planes in 2007 was indeed a covert nuclear reactor, as alleged by the United States.