Yemen's President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi has demanded talks on the country's political crisis be moved from Sanaa after he escaped house arrest in the militia-controlled capital, a U.N. envoy said.

Hadi expressed "reservations about continuing the current negotiations in Sanaa," the envoy Jamal Benomar wrote on his Facebook page, after a telephone conversation between the pair.

A French aircraft carrier launched operations in the Gulf against the Islamic State group Monday as the new Pentagon chief summoned top generals and diplomats to Kuwait to review war efforts.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter vowed the jihadists would suffer a "lasting defeat" as he convened the extraordinary meeting of more than two dozen senior military officers, ambassadors and intelligence officials at the sprawling U.S. Army base of Camp Arifjan.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi promised Sunday to release young people who may have been wrongly jailed during Egypt's crackdown on the opposition since he overthrew his Islamist predecessor in 2013.

In an almost 40-minute televised address, Sisi also said the jihadist targets that his country's air force struck in neighboring Libya last week had been carefully chosen to avoid civilian casualties.

New Pentagon chief Ashton Carter will hold talks Monday in Kuwait with top U.S. commanders and diplomats to discuss the war effort against the Islamic State jihadist group, officials said.

Carter flew to Kuwait City from Afghanistan on Sunday to chair the extraordinary meeting that will see more than two dozen senior military officers and ambassadors gather at the sprawling U.S. Army base of Camp Arifjan, officials said.

The lawyer of exiled Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan, being tried in absentia on corruption charges, accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Sunday of "exploiting" justice by raiding offices of two associates.

The former security chief, who was expelled from Fatah in 2011 and now lives in the United Arab Emirates, has not been in court for any of the hearings in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

A young Palestinian stabbed an ultra-Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem on Sunday before being apprehended by the city's mayor and his bodyguard, police and the municipality said.

Mayor Nir Barkat said that as he was driving past city hall, his team saw "a terrorist with a knife."

The head of al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's most prestigious seat of learning, called on Sunday for education reform in Muslim countries in an effort to contain the spread of religious extremism.

Speaking at counter-terrorism forum in the Saudi holy city of Mecca, al-Azhar grand imam Ahmed al-Tayib linked extremism to "bad interpretations of the Koran and the sunna," the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

Campaigning for Sudan's presidential and parliamentary elections starts Tuesday with Omar al-Bashir facing little competition for the presidency, a multi-party boycott and the opposition and press facing mounting repression.

Incumbent Bashir is seeking reelection on April 13 in elections which are expected to extend his rule which began in 1989 when he seized power in an Islamist-backed coup.

Kurdish fighters have launched an offensive against jihadists in Syria's northeastern Hassakeh province and pushed them from several areas, a monitoring group and the main Kurdish party said.

The offensive, launched late on Saturday, is aimed at retaking the town of Tal Hamis and areas around it that are under the control of the Islamic State group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A top Palestinian official on Sunday accused Israel of trying to topple the Palestinian Authority by continuing its freeze on millions of dollars in crucial tax monies.