Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads the Israeli team in peace talks with the Palestinians, said late Saturday in Washington that a two-state solution was in her country's best interest.

"The only way to keep Israeli values as a democratic state is by adopting the idea of two states for two people," one for Israelis and the other for Palestinians, Livni said at a conference held by J Street, a leftist pro-Israel lobbying group.

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit southern Israel overnight, the army said on Saturday, but no casualties or damage were reported.

A tweet from the official military account said the rocket struck open ground near the port city of Ashkelon just northeast of the Islamist Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave.

A French diplomat who allegedly struck an Israeli policeman in a confrontation in the West Bank is returning home by agreement between the two governments, an Israeli official said Friday.

"She's going to be going home," the foreign ministry official told Agence France Presse, referring to Marion Fesneau-Castaing, who had been serving at the French consulate-general in Jerusalem.

Israeli police arrested nine Palestinians and tried to disperse stone-throwing youths outside Jerusalem's Old City on Friday, a spokeswoman said.

Palestinians threw stones at policemen at Damascus Gate in Arab east Jerusalem, lightly injuring one, in ongoing small-scale clashes that followed Friday prayers, Luba Samri said in a statement.

U.S. anti-chemical weapons campaigner Paul Walker was jointly awarded the Swedish Right Livelihood Award on Thursday honoring those who work to improve the lives of others.

"Chemical weapons are easy to manufacture but very difficult to get rid of. Walker has 20 years of experience in how to eliminate them both politically and technically," Ole von Uexkull, director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, told Agence France Presse.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday demanded that any peace deal with Israel be permanent, calling new U.S.-brokered talks a "last chance."

Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly, Abbas urged international pressure to stop Israeli settlement building on Palestinian land.

Israel on Thursday denounced Iran's call to acknowledge its nuclear weapons, accusing new leader Hasan Rouhani of diverting attention from the regime's own nuclear work.

Rouhani, who is seeking a deal with the West on a nuclear standoff, called in a U.N. speech for the abolition of all nuclear weapons and urged Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iranian leader Hasan Rouhani Thursday called on Israel to admit it has a nuclear bomb ahead of a landmark meeting between Iranian and western foreign ministers.

Rouhani also said he believed a deal could be struck with the international community on his own country's controversial nuclear drive within three to six months.

Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged Israel to stop trying to displace Bedouin families in the West Bank, where the army last week manhandled European diplomats on an aid mission.

"The Israeli military should end its unjustified attempts to forcibly remove a decades-old community," the New York-based watchdog's Middle East director Joe Stork said in a statement.

Turkey's foreign minister says there has been "some progress" in improving Turkish-Israeli relations but Israel has not yet fulfilled all conditions for normalizing ties.

Relations between the former allies soured dramatically after Israeli commandos stormed a pro-Palestinian ship trying to breach a blockade of the Gaza Strip in May 2010. The raid killed eight Turks and one Turkish-American.