Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called an "urgent" leadership meeting Thursday to examine U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East policy speech, an aide said.

But his tentative partners in the Islamist Hamas movement immediately called on Obama to take "concrete steps" not merely issue "slogans" in support of Palestinian independence and an end to Israeli occupation.

Israel should not be asked to withdraw to the borders that existed before the 1967 Six Day War, Israel's prime minister said Thursday, after U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East policy speech.

In a statement issued after the speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office called on Washington to confirm it would adhere to "assurances" given to Israel by former president George W. Bush in 2004.

U.S. President Barack Obama declared Thursday that the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state must be based on 1967 lines, likely setting up a new clash with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a long-awaited survey of the "Arab spring" of revolts, Obama compared "shouts of human dignity" across the region to America's birth pangs and civil rights struggles, and said the uprisings showed repression would not work.

Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun stated on Tuesday that no new developments have taken place in the government formation process.

He said after the movement’s weekly meeting: “There is no desire to form a government or an initiative to facilitate its establishment.”

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea criticized on Tuesday the Nakba Day clashes that erupted on Sunday, noting the sparse military presence at Maroun al-Ras.

He said: “The army and security forces deployed heavily along the entire border, but there were only four or five soldiers at Maroun al-Ras.”

A new aid flotilla aiming to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip threatens to deal a fresh blow to Turkish-Israeli ties, a year after a bloody Israeli seizure of a Turkish activist ship.

Bilateral relations remain stuck in crisis after several fence-mending meetings between the one-time allies over the past year failed to yield results, a Turkish diplomat told Agence France Presse.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has stressed that the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland is a right and believed that it would be achieved soon.

Addressing the protesters who marched on Israel's borders with Lebanon, Syria and Gaza on Sunday, Nasrallah lauded their “courage and belief” for confronting Israel and crying out loud to inform the world about their clear stance.

Israeli gunfire killed three people and wounded hundreds Sunday as Palestinians marched on Israel's borders with Syria and Gaza in a mass show of mourning over the creation of the Jewish state.

Tensions along the Israeli-Syrian frontier spiraled as thousands of protesters from Syria tried to force their way into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, prompting the army to open fire in one of the worst incidents of violence there since a 1974 truce accord.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday after talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy that France wants the new Palestinian government to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

"What I heard from President Sarkozy is that they must recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people," Netanyahu said outside the Elysee Palace in Paris, after a meeting he described as "good, far-ranging and friendly".

Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun stressed on Wednesday that Prime Minister-designate Najib Miqati should respect the decisions of the majority that appointed him.

He said in an interview to OTV: “Members who don’t have a political presence in parliament should not take part in government.”