Israeli police arrested seven more people suspected of joining rock-throwing protests in a Bedouin village in northern Israel following an arson attack on a mosque there, a spokesman said Thursday.

"We arrested another seven people suspected of taking part in the demonstrations, which raises to 25 the total number of people being investigated over the incidents," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

Israel is to launch a spy satellite that will double the resolution of its images, keeping a close watch on Iran, Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday.

It said the satellite, built by Israeli firm Elbit and due for launch soon, would be able to take high resolution images from an altitude of 600 kilometers (360 miles).

Israel is a "threat" to its region because it owns nuclear weapons, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.

"I right now see Israel as a threat for its region, because it has the atomic bomb," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency, during an official visit to South Africa.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his government would announce a package of sanctions against neighboring Syria despite a U.N. resolution blocked by Russia and China.

"Unfortunately, the draft prepared in the form of a warning (against Syria) was vetoed during the vote at the U.N. Security Council yesterday," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has warned that he would “set fire" to the Middle East if foreign forces launched a military strike on his country and would ask for Hizbullah’s help to attack Israel.

An Arab source told Iran’s Fars news Agency that Assad made the warning to Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu during his visit to Damascus.

Health Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, who is Speaker Nabih Berri’s top aide, has unveiled that an Israeli raid killed two soldiers who were taken captive by Hizbullah fighters in a deadly cross border attack in July 2006.

In his memoirs of the 2006 summer war between Israel and Hizbullah published by As-Safir daily, Khalil said that Hizbullah official Hussein Khalil informed him about the death of the two soldiers in “one of the biggest secrets” of the conflict.

Speaker Nabih Berri criticized on Tuesday the international community’s “double standards” in dealing with Israel, accusing it of having hidden agendas in the Middle East.

He said before the Armenian parliament: “International decision-makers are placing all Arab regimes in the position of the accused in order to subject them to their will.”

Israeli police were on high alert in the north of the country on Tuesday after an attack targeting a mosque in a Bedouin village, where locals staged angry protests overnight, police said.

"Large numbers of police remain deployed in the village of Tuba Zangaria," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza staged demonstrations on Monday in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails.

The rallies were called five days after the inmates went on hunger strike to protest against the solitary confinement of some of their fellow prisoners, including a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Vandals torched a mosque in northern Israel in a suspected revenge attack by right-wing extremists that sparked a "furious" response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

The mosque, located in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria in the northern Galilee region, sustained heavy damage in the overnight attack, in which the arsonists scrawled the words "tag" and "revenge" on the walls.