President Barack Obama's nominee for U.N. envoy Wednesday slammed the global body's "unacceptable bias" against Israel, and pledged to lobby hard to get America's closest Mideast ally a seat on the Security Council.

Even as detractors criticize her past statements about Israel, genocide expert and human rights champion Samantha Power enjoys bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate, where broad cooperation this week on executive branch nominees was likely to ease her expected confirmation.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that Israelis and Palestinians are getting closer to resuming peace talks.

"Through hard and deliberate work, we have been able to narrow those gaps very significantly," Kerry told a press conference.

New EU guidelines barring its 28 members from funding projects in Jewish settlements mean Israel must move towards resuming peace talks instead of stalling, or risk international isolation, officials and commentators say.

The guidelines forbid dealing with or funding Israeli entities that lie outside Israel proper and beyond the so-called 1967 Green Line -- that is, in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

Vandals slashed the tires of 12 cars in a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem overnight, a police spokeswoman said on Wednesday, indicating that the vehicles all belonged to Jewish Israelis.

"The tires of 12 cars belonging to Jewish citizens living in the Abu Tor neighborhood were found slashed," Luba Samri said in a statement.

Gunmen from Syria infiltrated a disused army outpost in the Israeli-occupied area of the Golan Heights just beyond the ceasefire line, a military spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

The incident, which occurred overnight, saw an unspecified number of Syrian gunmen entering the position and firing towards an Israeli army patrol, which returned fire.

A year after an anti-Israeli bus bombing killed six people, Bulgaria is struggling to identify the attacker or confirm his suspected links to Hizbullah or Iran.

The July 18, 2012, bombing at Bulgaria's Black Sea Burgas airport was the deadliest attack on Israelis abroad since 2004 and the first in a EU member state.

Iran's president-elect has sent messages to Syria's Bashar Assad and Hizbullah, reaffirming support for the two allies.

The official IRNA news agency on Tuesday cited Hassan Rowhani as saying close Iranian-Syrian ties will be able to confront "enemies in the region, especially the Zionist regime," or Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday rejected European Union guidelines barring the bloc's 28 member states from funding projects in Jewish settlements.

"We shall not accept any external dictates on our borders," his office quoted him as telling an emergency ministerial meeting. "That is an issue that will be decided only in direct negotiations between the sides."

Israeli authorities are expected on Wednesday to give the green light for the construction of 1,071 new homes in six West Bank settlements, watchdog Peace Now said in a statement on Tuesday.

The news came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Jordan at the start of a sixth round of intense diplomacy to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, with Israel's settlement building a key sticky point.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Tuesday called for the resumption "as soon as possible" of talks between global powers and Iran on its contested nuclear program.

Ashton hosted talks between political directors from the so-called P5+1 group that has been negotiating with Iran and which is made up of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany.