Lebanon is technically ready to start drilling for offshore natural gas reserves, Energy Minister Jebran Bassil said on Monday, after exploration in around half the country's exclusive economic zone was completed.

"Lebanon has now reached the stage where it can start drilling for gas," Bassil told journalists on a tour to an area in the south of the country where reserves are disputed with Israel and Cyprus.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday attacked Western powers for misusing their U.N. veto power in their nuclear showdown with his country and for allowing "sacrilege" against Islam.

Ahmadinejad launched his virulent attack at a United Nations debate on the rule of law at which he said the United States, Britain and France "violate the basic rights and freedoms of other nations."

Israel must do more to halt a string of serious violations of Palestinian human rights documented by a 2009 fact-finding mission, according to a U.N. report published Monday.

There is a "need to more earnestly pursue accountability for the serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that were documented by the fact-finding mission," Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kyung-wha Kang told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak believes Israel should evacuate dozens of isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank while annexing larger blocs that are home to most of the settler population.

In excerpts of an interview in Yisrael Hayom published Monday, Barak said he was mulling a plan which would see Israel relinquish dozens of settlements while allowing residents of big blocs -- Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim and Ariel, where up to 90 percent of the settlers live -- to become part of Israel.

Israel has held new talks with the Palestinians over the development of a gas field off the coast of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli foreign ministry said in a new report released on Sunday.

The report, prepared for submission to a New York gathering of donors to the Palestinian Authority, describes meetings and initial negotiations between the two sides on the thorny subject of the development of the Gaza Marine gas field.

Iran could launch a pre-emptive strike if Israel prepares to attack it, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander told broadcaster Al-Alam on Sunday, a day after his boss warned that conflict was inevitable.

Should Israel and Iran engage militarily, "nothing is predictable... and it will turn into World War III," Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh told Iran's Arabic-language television network.

A Palestinian woman tried to stab an Israeli policeman on an east Jerusalem street on Sunday, apparently in protest at a US-made film which denigrates Islam, an Israeli police spokesman said.

"An Arab woman this morning tried to attack an Israeli policeman, who managed to control the situation and no one was injured," spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

An Islamist militant group said it launched a deadly cross-border attack on Israel from Egypt's Sinai in protest at a U.S.-made film mocking Islam, SITE Intelligence Group reported on Sunday.

Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem) termed the attack a "Disciplinary Invasion Against those who Dared Against the Beloved Prophet," the U.S.-based monitoring agency said, citing a statement posted on Islamist websites.

Israel will not accept alterations to its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday, as ties between the two countries continue to fray.

"There is not the slightest possibility that Israel will accept the modification of the peace treaty with Egypt," Lieberman told Israeli public radio. "We will not accept any modification of the Camp David accords."

Israel has transferred to Egypt the bodies of three militants who killed an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid, before being killed themselves, an Israeli military source said Saturday.

"Last night we handed over to Egyptian authorities the bodies of the three terrorists killed yesterday," the source told Agence France Presse, without elaborating.