A senior Hamas member has been killed in a suburb of the Syrian capital Damascus, an official of the group told AFP on Thursday, accusing Israel's spy agency of carrying out the attack.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak responded coyly to the suggestion, telling army radio: "I'm not sure that that's necessarily right."

A criminal court on Thursday jailed for 15 years each a former Mubarak-era cabinet minister and a businessman for selling Israel natural gas below market value, a judicial source said.

"The Cairo criminal court sentenced former oil minister Sameh Fahmi and fugitive businessman Hussein Salem to 15 years in prison each over the (Israel) gas deal," the source told Agence France Presse.

A Hamas member was killed Wednesday in a suburb of the Syrian capital Damascus, a senior member of the group told Agence France Presse, adding that they suspected Israel's spy agency of being behind the attack.

The victim was Kamal Hussein Ghannaje, said the official, speaking under condition of anonymity.

Israeli military police have arrested 15 people, most of them soldiers, accused of helping smuggle drugs from Egypt's Sinai peninsula across the southern Israeli border, the army said on Monday.

The military's website described the affair as "one the biggest ever in terms of the quantity of hard drugs."

Residents of Israel's Ulpana settlement outpost neighborhood in the West Bank began evacuating their homes on Tuesday after a court ruled their homes illegal and ordered them razed.

The evacuation was proceeding peacefully, with 15 of the neighborhood’s 30 families moving their possessions to a nearby temporary neighborhood -- also in the West Bank -- with help from defense ministry workers.

Israeli officials asked visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin to exert efforts to stop Syrian biological and chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Hizbullah, a senior Israeli diplomatic source said.

"We asked Putin for Russia to work more actively to preserve stability in Syria, to prevent biological and chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Hizbullah or other terror groups," the source told Israeli daily Haaretz.

Israeli media expressed almost unanimous concern on Monday about the victory of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi in Egypt's presidential election, warning of a difficult new reality.

"Darkness in Egypt," read the headline of the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper, with commentator Smadar Peri writing inside the newspaper that Mursi's victory was a dangerous development for Israel.

Israel's prime minister said his country respects the democratic election of Islamist Mohamed Morsi as Egypt's president on Sunday and wants to cooperate with the new government in Cairo.

Demonstrators battled police in central Tel Aviv on Saturday night in protest at what they said was excessive police use of force at a rally the previous night.

An Agence France Presse photographer saw several scuffles between police and protestors on Saturday and at least one demonstrator had a bloody face.

A leader of the ruling Hamas said Saturday the militant group had agreed to try anew an Egypt-brokered ceasefire with Israel, after six days of bloodshed in and around the Gaza Strip.

Hamas and "the Palestinian resistance factions will respect the truce as long as the (forces) of the occupation do the same and that's what we told our Egyptian brothers who demanded that we cease fire," Ayman Taha told Agence France Presse.