The vast majority of Israelis believe U.S.-brokered negotiations with the Palestinians will fail to bring any peace agreement, an opinion poll published on Friday showed.

About 80 percent of 507 Jewish and Arab Israeli respondents told Maariv newspaper that they believed the talks would not succeed.

Pope Francis's visit to the Middle East in May will inevitably have a "political dimension" and there are high expectations also among the Muslim population, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem said on Wednesday.

Fouad Twal said in an interview with I.Media, a news agency specialized in Vatican affairs, that he hoped the visit would also help develop closer relations between local Catholic and Orthodox communities.

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas briefed Jordanian King Abdullah II Wednesday on Middle East peace negotiations, after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry failed to find a framework deal for final talks.

"The meeting with his majesty focused on exchanging views about unifying the Jordanian-Palestinian position on... Kerry's initiative," the palace quoted Abbas as saying after a meeting with the king, whose country has a peace treaty with Israel.

After four days of intense diplomacy, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry headed home Monday, insisting progress had been made despite failing to agree a framework to guide Israeli-Palestinian talks.

On his 10th visit to the region as U.S. top diplomat, Kerry spent hours locked in separate meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas.

Pope Francis expressed readiness to visit Lebanon during a trip planned to the Holly Land, al-Joumhouria newspaper reported on Monday.

According to the daily, contacts are ongoing with the Vatican to convince the pontiff to make a brief visit to Beirut during his first trip to the Holy Land, visiting Amman, Bethlehem and Jerusalem in May.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian leaders Sunday of "inciting hatred," as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the region to push peace talks forward.

"The Palestinians are continuing their campaign of inciting hatred, as we have seen in the last few days with their refusal to recognize Israel as a state for the Jewish people," Netanyahu told a weekly cabinet meeting.

Secretary of State John Kerry Sunday rejected Israeli and Palestinian remarks the U.S. was biased as he made a whistlestop tour of allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia to woo support for his peace plan.

Kerry promised any agreed plan would be "fair and balanced" and likened his efforts to broker a compromise between the conflicting demands of the two sides to a puzzle.

A leader in the Salafist Jihadist movement in Jordan announced on Thursday that the al-Qaida-affiliated Al-Nusra Front in Syria and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have officially decided to militarily enter Lebanon.

"Al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani and ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the decision to officially and openly enter Lebanon,” the leader told the Washington-based United Press International.

A Jordanian-Palestinian critic of Jordan's monarchy has been charged with incitement and insulting the king after calling for revolt on social media, a security official said Tuesday.

Mudar Zahran, who currently resides in Britain, "is accused of inciting hatred against the regime, sectarian strife and insulting the king as well as security services," the official told Agence France Presse without saying when the suspect was charged.

An eight-year-old Jordanian boy hanged himself in his home in the northwestern city of Zarqa after bullies at his school taunted him about his deformed hand, police said on Tuesday.

Mustafa Ahmad Abu Osheibeh, "repeatedly cried and complained to his family that he was suffering because his peers and workers at his school made fun of his right hand, which has no fingers," a police spokesman told Agence France Presse.