Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has called on the Middle East peacemaking Quartet to force elections on Palestinians in a bid to oust president Mahmoud Abbas and revitalize the dormant peace process.

In a letter sent on Tuesday to the Quartet's top diplomats, a copy of which was obtained by Agence France Presse, Lieberman said that Abbas "apparently is uninterested or unable... to reach an agreement which would bring an end to the conflict."

The longest serving Syrian prisoner in Israel has been freed after 27 years behind bars, Syria's official news agency SANA said on Wednesday.

It said Sedki al-Maket, who was arrested in August 1985 for resisting the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, was released and had returned to his home town on the strategic plateau.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday strongly condemned a brutal hate attack on young Palestinians last week in Jerusalem, describing it as a combination of "racism and violence."

"In the state of Israel we will not tolerate racism nor the combination of racism and violence," he said in remarks relayed by his office.

Irish police said the evacuation of the Israeli embassy in Dublin on Tuesday following the discovery of a suspect device was a "false alarm".

"The security operation has ceased -- it's definitely a false alarm," a spokesman told Agence France Presse.

The authorities in Egypt are urging tribal leaders to support a security campaign in the Sinai Peninsula where an attack on August 5 killed 16 border guards, media reports said on Tuesday.

The defense minister, General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, asked tribal leaders who gathered on Monday in el-Arish in the north of the peninsula to "support the security forces and the campaign" in the area, government daily al-Ahram said.

Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu has sent an aide to meet Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of ultra-orthodox party Shas, to win his backing for an attack on Iran, Israeli media said on Tuesday.

Yaakov Amidror, head of the National Security Council, visited Yosef, whose party is a member of Netanyahu's ruling coalition, at his home in Jerusalem on Friday to discuss the issue, Israeli media reports said.

The FBI has investigated an incident that saw at least one Republican congressman swim naked at a drinking party in Israel last year attended by top leadership staff, Politico reported Sunday.

The news website said Representative Kevin Yoder of Kansas stripped and jumped into the Sea of Galilee during the privately-funded trip, joining colleagues and their family members who were partially or fully clothed.

The Israeli army has deployed an Iron Dome air defense system, designed to intercept and destroy rockets, days after two rockets were fired at the town of Eilat near the border with Egypt, a military spokeswoman said Monday.

"An Iron Dome battery has been deployed in the town of Eilat as part of tests, momentarily modifying the sites where these systems are deployed," she said but did not give further details.

Jerusalem police on Sunday arrested three Jewish teens suspected of a brutal hate attack on young Palestinians, and magistrates remanded in custody another suspect detained a day ago.

"Altogether four people have been arrested," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

The "cancerous tumor" of Israel is the biggest problem confronting Muslim countries today, Iran's supreme leader said on Sunday, repeating an epithet slammed just days earlier by U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and U.S. and EU officials.

In a speech marking Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said "the big powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and... installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world," according to the official IRNA news agency.