The international coalition carried out an intensive air raid overnight on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's southern stronghold of Sebha, a local resident told Agence France Presse Thursday.

Sebha, about 750 kilometers south of Tripoli, is bastion of Gadhafi's Guededfa tribe and home to an important military base.

Some 20,000 people gathered Thursday in the Syrian city of Daraa for the burial of victims killed by police gunfire the day before, chanting support for a rising anti-regime movement there, rights activists said.

One activist in Daraa, contacted by telephone, said the mourners made their way from the Omari mosque, where protesters have been holed up for a week, to the burial grounds under pouring rain, chanting: "With our souls, with our blood, we are loyal to our martyrs."

Fresh clashes in southeast Yemen between the regular army and elite Republican Guard loyal to embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh left three wounded on Thursday, witnesses and medics said.

In what was the second such clash this week, medics said two members of the elite force and an army colonel were wounded as the two sides clashed in Mukalla at dawn.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Thursday that coalition airstrikes against Libya had been a "success" and would continue.

France's defense minister, meanwhile, said intercepted communications showed that some forces under Moammar Gadhafi are wavering in their support of the Libyan leader.

Blasts and anti-aircraft fire rattled Tripoli Thursday as allied air raids against Moammar Gadhafi's forces entered a sixth day and a British officer said Libya's air force was mostly obliterated.

The anti-aircraft gunfire began at around 0430 GMT and there were ensuing explosions, an Agence France Presse reporter said.

Dubai police have foiled a bid to smuggle 16,000 guns from Turkey to Yemen's northern province of Saada, the stronghold of Shiite rebels, the Gulf emirate's police chief said on Thursday.

Six Arab residents of the United Arab Emirates of which Dubai is a member have been arrested as "police foiled a major attempt to smuggle arms from Turkey to Yemen," Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan told a press conference.

One person was killed and more than 30 were wounded when a bomb ripped through a bus in Jerusalem on Wednesday, just hours after Palestinian factions vowed revenge for two deadly Israeli raids on Gaza.

The bombing came several hours after two Grad rockets fired by militants in Gaza had slammed into the southern city of Beersheva, prompting Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to warn that anyone who attacks the Jewish state would learn it has an "iron will" to defend itself.

Twenty people were hurt, three of them seriously, when a bomb exploded next to a bus in Jerusalem, medics said, after Gazan militants threatened retaliation for a series of deadly Israel raids.

"The bomb was inside a bag which was left at the bus stop," Israel's Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch told reporters at the scene.

NATO will not take "political leadership" of the international coalition in Libya but will have a planning and operational role to enforce a U.N.-backed no-fly zone, the French foreign minister said Wednesday.

"NATO will intervene as a tool for planning and operational action" in applying the no-fly zone provided for in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, Alain Juppe said at a press conference.

Bahraini airlines have suspended flights to Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, where Shiite communities have criticized the kingdom's response to Shiite-led protests in the Gulf state, the airlines said Wednesday.

On Friday, Bahrain carried out a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy activists demonstrating since February 14 in the tiny Shiite-majority, Sunni-ruled kingdom.