Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi's visit to Jerusalem continues to be controversial, with some considering it a “historical mistake that opens the door for normalization with Israel,” and Church authorities reiterating that it has a strictly religious character.

Bishop Samir Mazloum assured OTV on Saturday evening that the patriarch “is not going to hold a peace treaty with Israel.”

Suspected Jewish extremists have uprooted dozens of olive trees in a Palestinian-owned field in the West Bank, Israeli police said Saturday.

"Twenty-five olive trees were uprooted and sawn up in a field belonging to Palestinians near Bat Ayin" in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, police spokeswoman Louba Samri told Agence France Presse.

Tunisians are embroiled in a heated debate over allowing Israeli tourists into the country, which does not recognize the Jewish state, before an annual pilgrimage that attracts Jews from around the world.

It is an open secret that Israelis have been visiting Tunisia for years on the quiet.

Suspected Jewish extremists vandalized a Muslim grave near the northern Israeli coastal city of Haifa, police said Friday, in the latest in a string of racist and religious attacks.

"Graffiti was found sprawled on and around a grave in the Al-Qassam cemetery in Nesher" north of Haifa, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.

Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi will travel to Jerusalem next month to greet Pope Francis, becoming the first head of the Maronite church to visit the holy land since Israel's creation in 1948, he said Friday.

"The pope is going to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. He is going to the diocese of the patriarch, so it's normal that the patriarch should welcome him," Rahi said by telephone from France.

Israel summoned Jordan's ambassador Thursday to protest an "anti-Israeli" article by a former Jordanian foreign minister, in which he based his argument on a Hitler quote, the foreign ministry said.

Spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel's embassy in Amman also sent the foreign ministry there an official protest over an article published on Monday by Kamel Abu Jaber in The Jordan Times.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel will seek to anchor its status as a “Jewish state” in law.

"One of my main missions as prime minister of Israel is to bolster the status of the State of Israel as the national state of our people," Netanyahu said in a speech in Tel Aviv.

Israeli police on Thursday challenged Washington's inclusion of Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians in a global terror report, saying such incidents could not be likened to militant attacks.

For the first time, the State Department's 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism, published Wednesday, included a reference to a growing wave of racist anti-Palestinian vandalism, euphemistically known as "price tag" attacks.

An Israeli force inspected an orchard in the South on Thursday morning in search of a “suspicious object” in the area.

The force, which comprised more than 20 soldiers, was examining a region facing the border town of Kfarkila, MTV reported.

More than 1,000 people gathered in the West Bank city of Ramallah Wednesday for the funerals of two Hamas militants Israel killed in 1998, whose remains had just been returned.

Israel transferred the remains of Imad Awadallah, 48, and his 46-year-old brother Adel, to Palestinian officials at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank overnight, Palestinian activists said.