The Israeli air force carried out an air raid on the Gaza Strip overnight, in retaliation for a Palestinian rocket attack against southern Israel, a military spokesman said Tuesday.

"An air force plane attacked two bases of Hamas terrorist activity in the southern Gaza Strip," the Israeli armed forces said in a statement.

A government-appointed committee has recommended that Israel legalize dozens of unsanctioned West Bank settlement outposts, a member of the panel said Monday, in defiance of international opposition to settling on land the Palestinians want for their future state.

The panel of jurists, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, also concluded that the West Bank is not occupied territory and therefore Israel has the legal right to settle it, according to Alan Baker, one of the committee members.

A Jerusalem court on Monday sentenced two Israeli police officers to 30 months in jail for negligence over the death of a Palestinian car thief in 2008, Haaretz newspaper reported.

Omar Abu Jariban died after being left, injured and confused, on the side of a road. He had illegally entered Israel from Gaza and was seriously injured after a car he had stolen rolled over on a highway.

Israel is mulling responses to the possibility that Lebanon will divert water from the Hasbani river under the guise of the construction of a tourism center near the border with the Jewish state, the Jerusalem Post reported on Monday.

A senior Israeli army officer in the Northern Command told the newspaper that the center could be used to divert water from the river, which supplies 25 percent of the Jordan river’s waters.

Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour shrugged off criticism over Lebanon’s failure to file a complaint with the U.N. on the latest deaths of Lebanese in a cross-border attack in the northern area of Wadi Khaled, saying the Syrian shelling was not intentional.

In remarks to al-Joumhouria daily published Monday and Tele Liban the day before, Mansour expressed regret at the death of two Lebanese in the shelling that took place over the weekend but said “such clashes do take place on the border of any country due to unintentional mistakes.”

Egyptian border guards have arrested 68 Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to sneak across the border into Israel, a security official said on Sunday.

The 47 Eritreans and 21 from Ethiopia were seized late on Saturday by an Egyptian patrol following a brief chase and warning shots after they were surprised trying to negotiate barbed wire that marks the border, he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday he will back a controversial plan to compel ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab Israelis to complete compulsory military or community service.

The decision was an about-turn for Netanyahu, who just last week had dissolved the panel whose recommendations he then endorsed, after a key coalition partner threatened to withdraw from the government if the proposals were not accepted.

The Foreign Ministry filed a complaint on Sunday to the United Nations against Israel after its forces abducted a citizen on June 29.

Youssef Zahra was kidnapped by an Israeli infantry patrol in Marj al-Teiss.

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso called on Sunday for a return to Israeli-Palestinian talks, warning the peace process must not become "an orphan of the Arab Spring."

Barroso was speaking after talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on the first day of a trip which includes stops in the West Bank and Israel.

Israelis and Palestinians clashed near the West Bank settlement of Itamar on Saturday but the two sides gave conflicting accounts of the incident.

Palestinian security officials said that settlers attacked Palestinian shepherds from the neighboring village of Yanun, south of Nablus, and stabbed five of their sheep to death.