German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Israel Friday to show "restraint" in the building of Jewish settlements, after talks with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

"We call on Israel to show restraint in the matter of settlement building," Merkel told a joint press conference with Abbas in Berlin.

Indefatigable U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is travelling back to Europe next week for talks on the war in Syria as well as the Middle East peace process, officials said Thursday.

The top U.S. diplomat, who only arrived back from a grueling two-week tour late Monday, will hit the road again for his 16th trip since he took office in February, heading to talks in Paris, London and Rome from Monday October 21 to Thursday.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday invited Pope Francis to visit the Holy Land, during an audience in the Vatican, journalists present said.

Abbas spoke to Vatican foreign affairs official Dominique Mambert after the audience, saying: "It was a pleasure and I invited him to the Holy Land".

The Russian agency involved in studying the remains of Yasser Arafat on Tuesday denied issuing any conclusions about the death of the late Palestinian leader, after a report cited its chief as saying he could not have died from polonium poisoning.

Russia's Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA) was one of several international agencies involved in exhuming Arafat's remains in November 2012.

Suspected Jewish extremists have vandalized Palestinian property in the West Bank in an apparent revenge attack for the killing of an Israeli soldier and evacuation of a settler outpost, police said Thursday.

Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse that "a number of suspects went into the village of Burqa" east of the Palestinian political capital of Ramallah, "and attempted to set fire to three vehicles".

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on Monday condemned an attack on a nine-year-old Israeli girl the day before in the West Bank.

"We oppose on principle aggression against anyone, and the spilling of blood," he told a group of Israeli MPs visiting his headquarters in Ramallah.

Suspected Jewish extremists burned two cars belonging to Arabs in east Jerusalem on Monday and scrawled graffiti blaspheming the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, residents said.

The residents said cars in the neighborhood of Beit Aksa had been vandalized in the past, but it was the first time they had seen graffiti insulting the prophet there.

The Palestinians must "recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people" in order to achieve real peace, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

"The Palestinians must abandon their refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to their national state," he said in a speech at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

Police have arrested 14 Jewish Israeli youths from Jerusalem on suspicion of carrying out a series of attacks targeting Arab Israelis, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse that the minors aged between 13 and 16, attended yeshivot -- religious Jewish seminaries.

The Gaza Strip's Islamist rulers Hamas on Wednesday hanged a prisoner who had been convicted of murder, its interior ministry said.

"At 4:30 pm (1430 GMT) on October 2, the death penalty was carried out against Hani Mohammed Abu Aliyan from Khan Yunis for his crime of killing Hazem Hassan Barham," the ministry said in a statement.