World powers are only making "minimalist" demands of Iran which would never be enough to make it halt its disputed nuclear drive, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Monday.

His remarks were made a week after top Israeli officials met in Jerusalem with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to discuss the upcoming talks between the so-called P5+1 group of world powers and Iran which are due to take place in Baghdad later this month.

Al-Qaida and its associates are behind the recent bomb attacks in Syria, the Russian foreign ministry said Monday.

"For us it is absolutely clear that terrorist groups are behind this -- al-Qaida and those groups that work with al-Qaida," Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told reporters.

NATO's bombing campaign in Libya left 72 civilians dead last year, a leading human rights group said Monday, accusing the military alliance of failing to acknowledge the deaths.

In a 76-page report, Human Rights Watch urged NATO to provide "prompt and suitable compensation" to families for the civilian deaths, injuries and loss of property.

Six people were killed in attacks in central and northern Iraq on Monday, including five who died in a spate of bombings in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah, officials said.

In Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, three bomb attacks in close succession killed five people and wounded 18 others.

Israel's new unity government could help move forward the stalled peace process, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a letter to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Haaretz newspaper reported on Monday.

The letter, which answers an earlier missive from Abbas about the stalled peace process, was delivered on Saturday, but so far, no details of its content have been made public.

Liberal civil society groups in Gulf States called Monday on Saudi and Bahraini leaders to postpone plans to announce a union between them, saying such a step must be preceded by a referendum.

"We urge the Saudi and Bahraini leaderships to review such a step and calculate the reactions of the two peoples," the Gulf Forum for Civil Societies said in a statement signed by its secretary general Anwar al-Rasheed.

In a bid to circumvent crippling international sanctions, Iran has been routinely switching off satellite tracking systems on its sea-bound oil tankers, The Washington Post reported late Sunday.

Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the newspaper said the practice has been going on for more than a month.

EU foreign ministers slapped a 15th round of sanctions against President Bashar Assad due to the "appalling violence" in Syria and discussed further support for Kofi Annan's peace plan.

The new European Union sanctions, to take effect Tuesday, mean 129 people and 43 firms or utilities are now targeted by an assets freeze and travel ban for backing the regime's 14-month campaign of relentless repression.

At least 37 people were killed in violence across Syria on Monday, among them 23 soldiers who died in fierce clashes between regime forces and rebels in the central city of Rastan, activists said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said reports indicated that three troop carriers were destroyed in the clashes that began at dawn on the outskirts of the rebel-held city in Homs province, which U.N. observers had toured last month.

Suspected al-Qaida militants blew up a gas pipeline supplying Yemen's Balhaf export terminal in the Gulf of Aden, the second such attack in a month, a government official said on Monday.

"A gas pipeline was blown up near Mayfaa" in Shabwa province in southeast Yemen late on Sunday, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.