Libya's warring factions arrived Thursday in Morocco for a fresh round of U.N.-brokered peace talks aimed at putting an end to months of fighting in the stricken North African state.

The talks involving rival parliaments are expected to begin on Friday, as U.N. envoy Bernardino Leon struggles to bring Libya's rival factions to agree steps aimed at forming a national unity government.

Britain will increase screening of arrivals at Dover and create a task force to tackle people smugglers, officials said on Wednesday, as growing numbers of migrants step up efforts to cross the Channel.

The announcement came a day after severe transport disruption caused by striking French ferry workers and migrants in Calais boarding trucks and attempting to enter the Channel Tunnel to reach Britain.

One person was killed and another seriously injured when a rubber dinghy carrying migrants headed for Italy came under fire off the Libyan coast on Monday, Italian media reported.

Reports said one migrant had collapsed into the sea and drowned while another, a Gambian national, had been helicoptered by the Italian navy to hospital on Lampedusa, an Italian island located between Sicily and North Africa.

EU foreign ministers formally approved Monday the launch of the first phase of a military operation to target people smugglers in the Mediterranean, officials said.

The initial ships and aircraft to conduct intelligence gathering missions should be available within a week, officials said.

People traffickers in Libya know they are untouchable and the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean is set to continue, the EU's border agency has told AFP.

The smugglers who pack thousands of people on unseaworthy boats for Europe "are organizing these departures without risk of being arrested, so for as long as the situation in Libya remains what it is, these flows will continue," Frontex spokeswoman Izabella Cooper said.

Tunisia said Friday it was shutting its consulate in conflict-hit Libya as 10 staffers abducted by an armed militia in Tripoli returned home after a week in captivity.

The staff were seized when gunmen burst into the consulate in the Libyan capital, in the latest attack targeting foreign citizens and diplomatic missions in the lawless nation.

It is "very probable" that al-Qaida-linked militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar was killed in a U.S. air strike, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Thursday, but he admitted he could not be sure.

Belmokhtar is an Algerian believed to have been behind a number of attacks, including the 2013 siege of an Algerian gas plant in which 38 hostages, mostly Westerners, were killed.

Three of 10 staffers kidnapped from Tunisia's Tripoli consulate by Libyan militia last week have been released, and the remainder are expected to be freed soon, the foreign ministry said Thursday.

Their release comes as Tunisian authorities announced that a Libyan man they have been holding, whose freedom was reportedly demanded by the kidnappers, is to be deported.

The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday urged Libyan factions to quickly reach a government agreement aimed at ending months of chaos and accept the latest proposals of mediator Bernardino Leon.

U.N. envoy Leon has been mediating between the Fajr Libya Islamist militia-led alliance and Libya's internationally recognized government to try and bring calm to a country that has been in turmoil since a NATO-backed revolt in 2011.

Libya's internationally recognized government was accused by a rights group on Wednesday of the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners it holds in the east of the country.

The "government and its allied forces are responsible for widespread arbitrary detentions and for torture and other ill treatment," a statement from Human Rights Watch alleged.