A senior Syrian official said nobody can stop embattled President Bashar Assad from seeking re-election and that a government team has been formed for peace talks, in an exclusive interview Thursday with Agence France Presse.

"Nobody has the right to interfere and say he must run or he should not run," Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad said, shortly after Russia criticized statements that he wanted to seek another term in 2014.

Pope Francis is to make a brief visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories from May 25, his first to the Holy Land, Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot said on Thursday.

According to the top-selling daily, which published what it said was a preliminary papal program, Israeli authorities are unhappy with the brevity of the 48-hour visit and the fact that the prelate will not celebrate mass in Israel, but in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Christ's traditional birthplace.

A bomb killed an electrical power plant manager Thursday in eastern Libya, while authorities also found the head of a man who had been kidnapped for ransom.

Adam al-Mansouri was killed when a bomb placed under his car exploded in the city of Tobruk, near the Egyptian border, a local official said.

Israel on Thursday urged China and other world powers to keep up pressure on Iran as talks on implementing a landmark nuclear deal were set to resume in Geneva.

"The world, in which China is a major player, should help the Iranian people to divorce themselves from the policies of threats and hostilities to prevent (Iran) from acquiring nuclear capability," Israeli President Shimon Peres said after meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Jerusalem.

U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on Thursday demanded the release of leading Syrian women's rights campaigner Razan Zeitouneh and three fellow activists, abducted last week by unknown kidnappers.

"We have all got to demand that they be released," Brahimi told activists from Syria and other countries as well as diplomats at a meeting at the U.N.'s Geneva offices.

Tunisian rapper Weld El 15 has been acquitted on appeal of singing songs deemed insulting to the police and is to be freed, his lawyer Ghazi Mrabet told AFP Thursday.

"The court in Grombalia has decided to acquit Weld El 15. He will be freed today" Thursday, said the lawyer after his client appealed a four-month jail term handed down at the start of December.

The body of a British doctor whose death in a Syrian jail was announced this week will be transported to Britain's embassy in Beirut, Syria's deputy foreign minister told AFP Thursday.

"At the family's request, the Syrian authorities and International Committee of the Red Cross are carrying out a final autopsy to find out the causes of Abbas Khan's death," said Faisal Muqdad.

Al-Qaida's branch in Syria will not accept any results that come from peace talks next month to end the civil war, its chief said in an Al-Jazeera television interview to be aired Thursday.

"We will not recognize any results that come out of the Geneva 2 conference," Al-Jazeera's website quoted Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, the head of Al-Nusra Front, as saying.

Syrian warplanes pounded northern Aleppo for a fifth consecutive day Thursday, unleashing their firepower against several rebel-held villages in the province, activists and a monitoring group said.

The latest attacks have killed at least 10 people in just two of the targeted villages, among them four women and two children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Syrian government forces are waging a systematic campaign of enforced disappearances to terrorize the population, amounting to a crime against humanity, a U.N.-mandated probe said Thursday.

"Enforced disappearances are perpetrated as part of a widespread campaign of terror against the civilian population," the Independent International Commission of Inquiry said in a report.