U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Jordan on Friday for talks with King Abdullah II on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a U.S. spokeswoman said.

The brief stop in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, where the talks were held, was not previously announced.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman left Israel on Thursday for Rome to meet his U.S. and Russian counterparts amid deadlock in peace talks with the Palestinians.

"The minister will meet John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov," his spokesman said, as Israel and the Palestinians engage in a war of words on the stalled U.S.-brokered negotiations.

U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice will travel to Israel in May to head an American delegation for wide-ranging bilateral talks, the White House said Wednesday.

The announcement came two days after President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and they found themselves once again very publicly at odds as they discussed the sensitive issues of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and Iran's nuclear program.

Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday directly urged Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and to "abandon the fantasy" of flooding Israel with refugees.

But his remarks sparked a furious reaction from the Palestinians who denounced his demand and said it had effectively put the final nail in the coffin of the U.S.-led peace talks.

An Israeli air strike on the northern Gaza Strip killed two Palestinians and wounded two others on Monday, the emergency services in the Hamas-run enclave said.

Emergency services chief Ashraf al-Qudra told Agence France Presse that Musaad Alzaneen, a man in his early 20s, was killed in the raid on farmland near the town of Beit Hanoun.

Israel needs to make some tough decisions in order to find peace with the Palestinians, U.S. President Barack Obama warned Benjamin Netanyahu in talks at the White House on Monday.

But the Israeli prime minister insisted that the Jewish state had already done its part for peace, while the Palestinians had not.

President Barack Obama will Monday try to cajole Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a U.S. framework for final peace talks with the Palestinians, but the Israeli leader is vowing to resist all "pressures."

Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu will also discuss Iranian nuclear diplomacy, but likely struggle to reconcile differing views after Israel blasted an interim pact with Tehran reached last year as a bad deal.

Israel's prime minister pledged Sunday to resist "pressures" as he left for Washington on a visit expected to center on peace talks with the Palestinians and the Iranian nuclear dispute.

"I am now leaving on an important trip to the U.S. where I will meet with President Barack Obama," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office quoted him as saying as he boarded his plane.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday Israel was doing all that was "necessary" to ensure its security, following reports of an air raid against Hizbullah targets on the Syrian-Lebanese border.

"We are doing everything that is necessary in order to defend the security of Israel," Netanyahu said at a joint news conference in Jerusalem with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday expressed concern Sunday at the progress of talks between world powers and Iran, saying that Tehran still sought to acquire a nuclear arms capability.

"Iran, in fact, is getting everything and giving virtually nothing," he told the cabinet on the eve of a visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and said he would discuss the issue with her.