Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is expected to make a televised speech on February 16 to commemorate the “Martyr Leaders Day”, As Safir newspaper reported on Monday.

Nasrallah's speech will address the local and regional developments, in addition to the conflict with Israel, the daily said.

Hatem is only 14 but has already lived through three wars with Israel. Now the young Gazan says he is making sure he'll be ready to fight in the next one.

"The Israelis killed my niece last summer. Now I want to kill them," he told Agence France Presse after completing a week-long youth training camp with militants from the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement.

The Middle East Quartet powers called Sunday for a speedy resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, urging both sides to avoid any action that could undermine efforts to settle the conflict.

Talks between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed in April despite the efforts of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to broker a deal, setting the stage for a bloody war in Gaza just a few months later.

Israel expressed fear over an escalation along its northern border with Lebanon as its Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon sounded the alarm over the upcoming developments after Hizbullah's attack against an military vehicle in the occupied Shebaa Farms, media reports said on Sunday.

“The situation along the northern border with Lebanon and Syria is heading towards further escalation,” Yaalon said in comments to Israel's Channel 10.

A bomb blew up the car of an official with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza, the second such attack in recent weeks, a security source said Saturday.

The blast, which occurred late on Friday night but caused no casualties, comes as political tensions mount in the Palestinian territory.

Washington received an official apology from Lebanon on its participation in the “White House conference on efforts to counter violent extremism,” because it cannot be a “partner with Israel in confronting terrorism,” media reports said.

More than 60 countries, including 14 Arab nations and Israel, are expected to take part in the summit slated on February 18 at the White House and presided by U.S. President Barack Obama.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will not attend a controversial speech Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to make to Congress next month, in a new White House snub of the Israeli prime minister.

"The Vice President's office expects that the Vice President will be traveling abroad during the joint session of Congress," an official said.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Friday said he had canceled a plan to attend the Munich security conference in protest at the inclusion of Israeli representatives in a session on the Middle East.

"I was going to participate in the conference but we decided not to after they included the Israeli representatives in the Middle East session," he told the official Anatolia news agency in Berlin.

General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim visited on Friday the headquarters of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon to extend his condolences over the death of a Spanish peacekeeper last week.

Ibrahim met with UNIFIL Commander Maj. Gen. Luciano Portolano at the mission's base in the southern town of Naqoura.

French Ambassador Patrice Paoli has denied that Paris was drafting a U.N. Security Council Resolution against Hizbullah as a top official in New York warned that the situation in the border area between Lebanon and Israel remains “very fragile.”

France “calls for the protection of Lebanon's sovereignty, its territorial integrity and Resolution 1701,” Paoli said in remarks published in An Nahar daily on Friday.