The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas said on Saturday it does not plan to move its headquarters out of unrest-hit Syria.

"There is no change, and Hamas has not taken any decision to leave Syria, and we are still there," spokesman Fawzi Barhum told Agence France Presse.

The United Nations on Friday called on Israel to immediately halt the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank after reporting a dramatic rise in demolitions in the past year.

Israeli forces destroyed 622 Palestinian homes in the West Bank in 2011, "forcibly displacing" almost 1,100 people, over half of them children, according to a U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Thursday the Palestinians' announcement that they were ending informal talks with Israel does not mean the two sides have reached an "impasse."

"I do not think there is an impasse. I know that President (Mahmoud) Abbas is thinking carefully about how to move forward. For him the meeting of the Arab (League) Follow up Committee in Cairo is extremely important," Ashton told reporters after meeting with Abbas in Amman.

Israel on Sunday proposed a compromise deal allowing residents of an illegal West Bank outpost that the high court has ordered evacuated to stay in their homes while new ones are constructed nearby.

The High Court of Justice has ordered the government to demolish the Migron outpost, which was established on private Palestinian land and without government authorization, by the end of March 2012.

About 200 Palestinians staged a demonstration on Saturday in the West Bank town of Ramallah against the exploratory talks with Israel being held in Jordan.

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators have held three such meetings in Amman this month in a bid to restart direct peace talks which have been on ice since September 2010, but without any concrete results.

Thailand said Thursday that it has recognized a Palestinian state, in a move hailed by Palestinian leaders eager to boost their international standing amid a stalemate with Israel.

Thailand has "officially recognized the state of Palestine and officially informed all permanent and observer missions to the United Nations in New York of this development," a press officer for Thailand's mission said.

Israeli Special Forces detained two Palestinians early on Thursday morning near the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a security official told Agence France Presse.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Israeli forces "crept into the Rafah area and took two citizens to an unknown destination and there is no information on what happened to them."

Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal met the Swiss Middle East envoy in Cairo late on Wednesday as part of efforts to normalize relations with European governments, sources in the Islamist movement told Agence France Presse.

A Hamas official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Meshaal and Jean-Daniel Ruch, whose country is not part of the European Union, discussed the possibility of relations between Europe and the Islamist group which rules Gaza.

An Israeli air raid on the northern Gaza Strip killed one Palestinian and wounded two on Wednesday, a spokesman for the Hamas-run emergency services told Agence France Presse.

The strike hit a field used by Hamas militants just east of the town of Beit Hanun, Palestinian security sources said.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday issued a call to Syria's Bashar Assad to stop killing his people, warning the embattled president he was heading for a dead end.

Ban said in a keynote address at a conference on Arab world democracy in Beirut: "Today, I say again to Assad of Syria: Stop the violence. Stop killing your people. The path of repression is a dead end,"