Gunmen killed eight people in an attack on a jewelry shop on Monday, one of several attacks in and around Baghdad that left at least 13 people dead, most of them police officers, officials said.

The attack on the shop, in the Urr neighborhood of north Baghdad, left eight people dead, the interior ministry said on its website, including the two owners of the shop and four members of the security forces.

U.N.-Arab League peace envoy on Syria, Kofi Annan, held talks with top Qatari officials on Monday after a weekend trip to Damascus where he urged leaders to end the bloodshed there, the official Qatari news agency reported.

Annan, who arrived in Doha on Sunday, met with the emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani to "review the developments in Syria," according to a statement released by the QNA news agency.

Nine suspected al-Qaida militants have been killed in an artillery attack by the Yemeni army backed by U.S. drone strikes on their strongholds in the country's south, a local official told Agence France Presse Monday.

Three extremists were killed when U.S. drones fired missiles late on Sunday targeting their weapons hideouts in Jabal Khanfar, a hill overlooking the Abyan town of Jaar, which is controlled by al-Qaida militants, the official said.

Top officials from the United States, Russia, United Nations and European Union will meet Monday to discuss deadlocked efforts to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the U.N. said.

It will be the first top level meeting of the diplomatic Quartet in six months and comes amid a new flare-up in violence which has left at least 21 Palestinians dead in Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip since Friday.

Iran stands fully behind Syria and blames the United States and Arab nations for the bloody unrest shaking its ally, media on Monday quoted a deputy foreign minister as saying.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran underlines its total support for the Syrian people and government," Hossein Amir Abdollahian said, according to Iran's official IRNA news agency.

China on Monday urged Israel to stop air raids on Gaza and called on both sides for an immediate ceasefire after Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu vowed no let-up against rocket-firing militants.

Israel launched another spate of air strikes earlier Monday, bringing the death toll in Gaza to 20 in three days of tit-for-tat violence that began with Israel's killing of a senior militant on Friday.

The bodies of 47 women and children, some with their throats slit, were found in the flashpoint Syrian city of Homs prompting the opposition to call Monday for foreign military intervention.

The Syrian authorities accused "terrorist gangs" of carrying out the killings in a bid to intensify pressure on President Bashar al-Assad's regime at a meeting at the United Nations on Monday of foreign ministers of the major powers.

U.S. drones bombed suspected al-Qaida arms caches in a hilly region in Yemen's restive southern province of Abyan on Sunday, witnesses told Agence France Presse.

Six missiles targeted the suspected weapons hideouts in Jabal Khanfar, a hill overlooking the Abyan town of Jaar, which is controlled by al-Qaida militants, the witnesses said.

At least 34 people, almost half of them civilians, were killed across Syria on Sunday as peace envoy Kofi Annan held a second round of talks with President Bashar al Assad, a monitoring group said.

The casualties comprised 15 civilians, 14 regular army soldiers and five rebel fighters, with most of the casualties occurring in the provinces of Idlib and Damascus and in the city of Hama, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal on Sunday slammed the Syrian regime, accusing it of committing "butchery against its people."

At least 8,500 people, most of them civilians, have been killed since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime began in March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.