Israel's intelligence minister Monday slammed as unacceptable comments by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program which he said indicated a "surrender" to Tehran.

"The things Kerry said in the Congress are worrying, they are surprising and they are unacceptable," Yuval Steinitz, who is also strategic affairs minister, told public radio.

Israeli police on Monday limited Muslim access to Jerusalem's flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque compound, fearing new violence after clashes at the weekend, a spokesman said.

As part of the security measures, male residents of Jerusalem would face age restrictions, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon on Sunday approved the return of Jewish settlers to a contested house in the West Bank city of Hebron, a statement from his office said.

Israel's Supreme Court ruled last month that settlers were the lawful owners of the building in the heart of the occupied city, ending a legal dispute lasting nearly seven years.

An Islamic militant serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison has declared an open-ended hunger in protest at his solitary confinement, a Palestinian prisoner support group said on Sunday.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Prisoners' Club said that about 200 other Palestinians spread across several Israeli jails would fast in solidarity with former Hamas military leader Ibrahim Hamed, taking it in turns to each go without food for limited periods.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met on Sunday in a fresh bid to save their teetering U.S.-brokered peace talks, a Palestinian official said.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat was meeting in Jerusalem with his Israeli opposite number, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's special envoy Yitzhak Molcho, he told Agence France Presse.

Palestinians and Israeli police clashed at the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City on Sunday, police said.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the violence erupted when police opened one of the walled compound's gates to non-Muslim visitors, according to the regular visiting hours.

France's former first lady Carla Bruni declared herself "crazy about Israel" and talked about Jewish family ties in an interview published by an Israeli daily on Friday.

Ahead of a May 25 concert in Tel Aviv, the singer, guitarist and former model told the Hebrew-language Yediot Aharonot that she hoped to bring both her husband, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and her son Aurelien with her.

Israel has demolished several European Union-funded humanitarian housing shelters in a highly sensitive strip of West Bank land near Jerusalem, an EU official said Friday.

"On April 9, three of some 18 residential structures were demolished... in Jabal al-Baba," an area outside the sprawling settlement of Maale Adumim, a spokesman for the EU's delegation to the Palestinian territories told Agence France Presse.

Ron Pundak, a longtime peace activist and architect of the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, died at home of cancer Friday, aged 59, Haaretz daily reported.

In the early 1990s, with the approval of then foreign minister Shimon Peres, Pundak and fellow Israeli academic Yair Hirschfeld forged a secret channel of communications with the Palestine Liberation Organization in Norway, at a time when such links were illegal for Israelis.

Israel's military on Friday occupied a Jewish seminary in an extremist West Bank settlement after a series of clashes between settlers and security forces there.

"Following the recent increase in violence towards security forces, and in order to address ongoing security concerns, (the army) positioned a company of border police in the Yitzhar yeshiva building," it said in a statement.