Israeli President Shimon Peres expressed hope on Wednesday that his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would vanish during the coming year, along with others whom he said threaten the Jewish State.

"I pray that next year will be the greatest year in the history of the State of Israel and that those, like Ahmadinejad, who threaten us will disappear," his office quoted him in English as telling visitors to his official residence during an open day to mark Sukkot, the week-long Jewish Feast of Tabernacles.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to call elections in mid-February 2013, more than six months early, Israeli media and ministers said on Wednesday.

In recent weeks, speculation has been rife that Netanyahu, who continues to ride high in the polls, might bring forward elections scheduled for next October, rather than try to pass a controversial new budget before the vote.

A Palestinian taxi injured four Israeli soldiers in a hit-and-run incident in the West Bank on Tuesday, but it was not immediately clear if it was a deliberate attack, police told Agence France Presse.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said those injured were part of a group of six soldiers standing at the side of the road alongside their vehicle, near the settlement of Neveh Daniel, southwest of Bethlehem.

Israeli police arrested five people on Tuesday, two Israeli Jews and three Arabs, for disturbing the peace and attacking police at the compound where the Al-Aqsa mosque is located, police told AFP.

The arrests came as a group of rightwing Israeli Jews visited the compound, known as the Temple Mount by Jews and the Haram al-Sharif by Muslims. It is the third holiest site in Islam and is revered as Judaism's most sacred place.

A small group of protesters, most of them women, on Tuesday trashed an Iranian police post protecting the French embassy in Tehran and threw stones at visitors to the mission before being arrested, a diplomat inside told AFP.

The unannounced, violent demonstration lasted 90 minutes and involved around 15 people, the French diplomat said.

International sanctions against Iran are biting but are not slowing the country's nuclear program, Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Tuesday.

"The sanctions and the pressure in place against Iran for around the past two years are effective, but the centrifuges continue to turn," Yaalon told Israeli public radio.

Iran on Monday added its voice to warnings against Syria ever using chemical weapons in its increasingly large-scale war with anti-government insurgents.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in New York that Iran could not support any country -- including ally Syria -- that used such weapons, calling this "a situation that will end everything."

U.S. Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney attacked President Barack Obama's Middle East policy late Sunday, stepping up the pressure after a wave of anti-U.S. protests in the Islamic world.

In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Romney said of recent "disturbing" developments in the Middle East that the United States "seems to be at the mercy of events rather than shaping them.

International sanctions could trigger a popular uprising in Iran similar to last year's revolution in Egypt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, Israel's foreign minister said in statements published Sunday.

"The opposition demonstrations that took place in Iran in June 2009 will come back in even greater force," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview published by Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

The Israeli navy killed a Palestinian fisherman and wounded another in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical officials said on Saturday.

The brothers had been near the coast off Beit Lahiya along with other fishermen when the Israeli navy opened fire on their boats, the Gaza fishing union said.