Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said Monday his movement is committed to efforts to secure a truce with Israel, but insisted the Jewish state must lift its six-year blockade of the Gaza Strip.

"We are committed to a ceasefire, but Israel must stop its aggression," Meshaal said. “We don't want an escalation, because Hamas and all resistance factions are courageous but they are also rational," he added.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the United Nations on Monday of failing to act over the deadly Israeli air bombardments of Gaza, calling Israeli a "terrorist state" that "massacres innocent children".

He accused the U.N. Security Council of "turning a blind eye" to the suffering of Muslims across the world and called for "sincere action" to end Israel's strikes on Gaza, where 90 Palestinians died since violence erupted on Wednesday, while three Israelis have been killed in militant rocket fire.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle will travel to the Middle East on Monday for talks aimed at encouraging a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza militants, his spokesman said.

Westerwelle will meet his Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman in Jerusalem late Monday before seeing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and his Qatari counterpart urged an immediate ceasefire in Gaza on Monday, as Israel and militants in the Palestinian enclave traded fire for a sixth straight day.

"We are very worried about the escalating violence," Monti said at a joint news conference in Doha with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani.

The Algerian army has killed three Islamists in the restive Kabylie region, including Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb's top military commander, several Algerian newspapers reported on Monday.

Rabah Makhfi, 45, also known as Sheikh Nacer and considered AQMI leader Abdelmalek Droukdel's right hand man, was among the three killed in Bejaia, 250 kilometers (155 miles) east of Algiers, on Friday, Arabic-language daily Ennahar reported.

Rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas said on Monday they have decided to end infighting in a show of solidarity in the West Bank over the Gaza crisis, an AFP reporter said.

"From here, we announce with other (factional) leaders, that we are ending the division," senior Fatah official Jibril Rajoub told a crowd of about 1,000 who gathered for a demonstration in Ramallah, the West Bank's political capital.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Monday said the alliance would consider a request from Turkey to deploy Patriot anti-missile batteries along its border with Syria "as a matter of urgency.”

Rasmussen, arriving for a meeting of European Union defense ministers, said NATO had received no formal request from NATO-member Turkey to date but added that if one was made, "we will consider that as a matter of urgency.”

A Palestinian was beheaded in Saudi Arabia on Monday after being convicted of forming a gang to carry out robberies in the kingdom, the interior ministry said.

Mohammed al-Khalili "formed a gang with others that carries out thefts, burglaries, and robbery against homes," said the statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will pay a visit Tuesday to the Gaza Strip, which has been battered by a deadly Israeli air bombardment in six days of violence between Israel and Palestinian militants, the foreign ministry said.

Davutoglu's trip is part of an Arab League initiative, the Anatolia news agency said, referring to a planned visit Tuesday by a delegation from the bloc and its leader Nabil al-Arabi in a show of support for Gaza.

The Israeli army on Monday took over programming at a Gaza-based Hamas television station "to broadcast warnings," as deadly violence between the sides entered its sixth day.

Al-Aqsa television, the official station of Gaza's Hamas rulers, said in a statement the Israeli army "is interfering with Al-Aqsa TV," with the picture going on and off for several hours and sometimes appearing scrambled.