Captured soldier Gilad Shalit is to return to Israel on Tuesday at the same time as 450 Palestinian prisoners are freed if the terms of a swap deal are respected, a senior Israeli official said on Friday.

"We hope that the timetable laid out in the agreement will be respected and that Gilad Shalit will return home on Tuesday," said the official from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office told Agence France Presse, saying a first tranche of prisoners would be released at the same time.

The United States' special envoy for Middle East peace, David Hale, will meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas during his visit to Paris, the U.S. embassy here said Thursday.

"Hale is going to meet with Abbas," embassy spokesman Paul Patin told Agence France Presse. He could not say when the meeting would take place or provide other details.

Egyptian warplanes are patrolling the Sinai without Israeli consent, despite a 1979 peace treaty limiting Egypt's military presence in the peninsula, Egypt's air force chief said on Thursday.

Parts of the Sinai have been off-limits to Egyptian troops under the terms of the 1979 treaty by which Israel agreed to end its occupation but in recent months the army has deployed reinforcements with Israeli consent to tackle suspected Islamist militants.

Captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is expected to return to Israel via Egypt by next Wednesday, Palestinian sources and Israeli media said on Thursday

A senior Palestinian official said a first group of 450 Palestinian prisoners would be released next Tuesday, followed by Shalit's release on Wednesday.

Israel has apologized to Egypt for the border killings of six policemen in August that sparked a diplomatic crisis between the two neighbors, Egypt's foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

The policemen were killed on August 18, as Israeli troops hunted down militants who had carried out deadly attacks near the border with Israel.

Turkey on Wednesday welcomed a deal between Israel and Hamas in which a Franco-Israeli soldier, held for five years, is to be exchanged for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners.

"We are happy," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, of the deal that will see the Palestinian militant group free Gilad Shalit, who they have held since 2006.

Four synagogues in the northern Israeli town of Safed have been vandalized, with assailants spray painting "death to Jews" on the structures, Israeli police told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

The incident came after an attack last week on an Arab-Israeli mosque, and police said they were looking at whether Tuesday night's incident was a revenge attack.

Israeli and Hamas officials announced late Tuesday that they have reached a prisoner swap deal to free a captured Israeli soldier held in the Gaza Strip in exhange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, capping five years of painful negotiations that have repeatedly collapsed in fingerpointing and violence.

The deal would bring home Sgt. Gilad Schalit, who was captured in a cross-border raid in June 2006 by Palestinian militants who burrowed into Israel and dragged him into Gaza. Little has been known about his fate since then.

Israeli forces on Tuesday demolished for the third time a mosque in a remote Bedouin village in the Jordan valley, Palestinian security forces said.

The demolition took place in the village of Khirbet Yarza, some five kilometers east of Tubas in the northeastern corner of the West Bank.

Israeli activists on Tuesday prevented Palestinians from visiting relatives held in a jail in northern Israel to protest the ongoing captivity of soldier Gilad Shalit, an activist told Agence France Presse.

Around 50 supporters of Shalit, who was snatched by Gaza militants in 2006, stopped a bus carrying Palestinians from reaching the Gilboa Prison in the Beit She'an valley, Shalit activist Shimshon Liebman said.