U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met Cyprus leaders Thursday to spur talks on ending their island's 40-year division and seek support for threatened sanctions against Russia.

After talks with President Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot leader, and Turkish Cypriot counterpart Dervis Eroglu, Biden cautioned against overstating the role of the United States in reunification efforts.

Israeli soldiers on Wednesday pointed their weapons at a Lebanese Army post near the Fatima border gate as other troops opened fire towards a Lebanese citizen.

Twenty Israeli soldiers "loaded their individual weapons and pointed them towards an army post at the Fatima gate, hurling insults at its troops,” a Lebanese Army statement said.

Israel's Supreme Court on Wednesday heard an appeal by the parents of a U.S. activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003.

The parents of Rachel Corrie asked for a decision clearing the military of any responsibility for her death to be overturned, alleging "negligence" in the treatment of the case by an Israeli court.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman brushed off demands Wednesday from at home and abroad for an investigation into the deaths of two Palestinian youths killed by Israeli forces last week.

The pressure came after video footage emerged appearing to show the two Palestinians being shot unprovoked, prompting calls from Washington and the United Nations for a full investigation.

The Israeli army kicked off a project to rehabilitate roads near the barbed wire along the border with southern Lebanon.

According to the state-run National News Agency, rail road excavators and bulldozers accompanied by 3 armored vehicles and around 20 soldiers began at 9:00 am paving roads adjacent to the southern towns of Adaisseh and Kfarkila.

Israeli police on Tuesday arrested four people suspected of "acts of racist vandalism" in the north of the country, a police spokesman said.

"Four people suspected of acts of racist vandalism in the town of Yokneam were arrested and questioned by the police and the Shin Bet" internal security agency, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

A top U.N. official on Tuesday called for an investigation into the deaths of two Palestinian teens fatally shot last week by Israeli border policemen in the West Bank.

The youths were shot dead as Israeli police responded to demonstrations marking the 66th anniversary of the Nakba -- or "catastrophe" -- of the Jewish state's creation.

A senior Palestinian official on Tuesday accused Israel of the "deliberate execution" of two Palestinian teens shot dead by border policemen in a clash in the West Bank last week.

But an Israeli army spokesman told AFP that video footage purporting to show the two being killed without provocation on Thursday had been doctored.

Israel has sent two anti-terror experts to Nigeria to join the search for hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped by extremist Islamist group Boko Haram, an Israeli security source said on Tuesday.

"There are in Nigeria two advisers who have dealt in terrorist matters in the past," he told Agence France Presse. "They were sent there by the state to help."  

On a lonely hill in northern Israel, a stone's throw from the Lebanese border, stands Iqrit church, one of the last vestiges of a village razed by Israeli troops in 1951.

This small, white church is a symbol of the enduring memory and resistance shown by the Christians of historic Palestine who are reaching out for help to Pope Francis, who begins a three-day visit to the Holy Land on Saturday.