Israeli police said they arrested two men from a hardline West Bank settlement Tuesday on suspicion of carrying out hate crimes and a third for condoning violence against soldiers.

"Two people from Yitzhar were arrested in connection with an ongoing investigation into suspicions of criminal activity of a nationalistic nature," spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse, adding that a court order barred him from giving further details.

In what some are calling a complex game of "papal propaganda poker," Pope Francis's prayer at Israel's West Bank separation barrier handed a decisive victory to the Palestinians, commentators said.

"One image from the pope's visit has already become history," admitted Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, saying the picture of the pope's impromptu stop to rest his hand and forehead on the wall "immediately became a Palestinian PR achievement."

A senior Hizbullah commander branded by the FBI as one of the world's most wanted terrorists was killed fighting in Syria, residents of his village in southern Lebanon told Agence France Presse Tuesday.

Hizbullah has deployed thousands of fighters into neighboring Syria to back President Bashar Assad's army as he battles insurgents who have been trying to overthrow him for the past three years.

The killing of two Israelis by an unknown gunman in Brussels may have been a planned assassination rather than a random act, Israel's Haaretz daily said on Tuesday.

The attack, in which a gunman opened fire at the Jewish museum in the Belgian capital on Saturday, killed three people, including an Israeli couple in their 50s who reportedly had ties to an Israeli government agency.

Pope Francis celebrated mass at a contested Jerusalem site on Monday at the end of a whirlwind pilgrimage which he marked by making a personal bid for Middle East peace.

The 77-year-old pontiff, who has made interfaith dialogue a cornerstone of his papacy, made an impassioned call for an end to religious intolerance, and insisted that believers must have free access to sites they consider sacred within the Holy City.

A Turkish court on Monday ordered the arrest of four former Israeli military chiefs over a deadly 2010 maritime assault, in a move which could jeopardize reconciliation efforts between the countries.

The court in Istanbul will ask Interpol to issue international arrest warrants for four men involved in a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship, Cihat Gokdemir, a lawyer working on the case, told Agence France Presse.

Israel on Monday approved plans for 50 new settler homes in annexed east Jerusalem as Pope Francis wrapped up a visit to the region, city officials said.

"The municipality has given the green light to build 50 new housing units in five buildings in Har Homa," city councilor Yosef Pepe Alalu told AFP.

Pope Francis faces a diplomatic high-wire act on Monday as he visits sacred Muslim and Jewish sites in Jerusalem on the final day of his Middle East tour.

The pontiff is rounding off a whirlwind trip which saw him issue a unique invitation to the Israeli and Palestinian presidents to pray with him at the Vatican to end their "increasingly unacceptable" conflict, as well as snatching a personal prayer moment at Israel's controversial separation barrier.

Belgium's Jewish community was placed on high alert Sunday as police hunted down a gunman who shot dead three people at the Brussels Jewish Museum in an attack blamed on growing anti-Semitism.

An Israeli tourist couple and a French woman died from gunshots to the face and neck after a man apparently acting alone fired two successive rounds into the museum on Saturday afternoon before escaping minutes later on foot.

Pope Francis made an unscheduled stop at Israel's towering West Bank separation wall in Bethlehem Sunday after calling for an end to the "increasingly unacceptable" Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The pope has said his three-day visit to the Middle East, which began in Jordan Saturday, has "purely religious" motives, but Palestinians hoped he would show support for statehood, weeks after the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks with the Israelis.