Israel's main political parties began intensive coalition talks on Sunday, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was formally tasked with forming a new government following last month's election.

Netanyahu, whose rightwing Likud-Beitenu list won a narrow victory with 31 of the Knesset's 120 seats, now has 28 days to piece together a government facing key diplomatic and foreign policy issues.

Iran's installation of new equipment at its Natanz nuclear plant will speed up enrichment efforts and complicate plans to prevent Tehran from building a weapons capability, Israel said on Sunday.

Speaking just before the formal start of talks to build Israel's new ruling coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the most important mission which will face the new government was preventing a nuclear Iran.

Israel on Sunday implicitly confirmed it staged an air strike on Syria this week, as President Bashar Assad accused the Jewish state of trying to "destabilize" the strife-torn country.

Four days after an air raid which Damascus said targeted a military complex near the capital, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke to reporters in Munich but refrained from directly confirming that Israel staged the strike.

Palestinians and activists were on Saturday forcefully removed from a new camp near a West Bank village, after a third attempt at the novel form of protest against Jewish settlement.

An Agence France Presse correspondent said the army used tear gas and violence to remove hundreds of people who had set up four temporary huts and three tents near Burin, south of Nablus in the northern West Bank.

The United States is increasingly concerned that "chaos" in Syria could allow Hizbullah to obtain sophisticated weapons from the Damascus regime, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Agence France Presse in an interview.

Speaking two days after Israel carried out a bombing raid on a military site outside Damascus, Panetta said Washington was worried Hizbullah could exploit the 22-month conflict in Syria.

Israeli warplanes flew over southern Lebanon Friday, two days after an airstrike near Damascus, as Syria's army chief of staff warned against testing his country's capabilities.

Gen. Ali Abdullah Ayoub made his comments Thursday during a visit to some military units in the country. The al-Baath newspaper, the mouthpiece of President Bashar Assad's ruling party, quoted Ayoub as saying Syria will never change its stance "no matter how much the enemy carries out provocative and hostile acts."

Israeli media on Friday warned that an alleged air strike on a convoy carrying arms from Syria to Hizbullah could set off a chain reaction, and reported troops on high alert in the country's north.

There was still no official Israeli comment on Syrian claims that Israeli warplanes bombed a military site near Damascus on Wednesday or on separate reports that its aircraft struck a weapons convoy along the Syria-Lebanon border.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused on Thursday Iran and Hizbullah of playing an increasingly prominent role in the Syrian war.

The U.S. is "disturbed by increasing Iranian and Lebanese Hizbullah activities" in Syria, Clinton told reporters on the eve of her last day as secretary of state.

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday said he had finished meeting all party representatives, and would soon be announcing who he would task to form the new coalition government.

The president "completed his marathon series of meetings today as part of the consultations for the formation of the next government," a statement from Peres's office read.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon is gravely concerned about reports of an Israeli air strike on Syria but cannot independently verify what happened, a spokesman said Thursday.

On top of a protest to the United Nations, Syria has also complained to the U.N. Security Council about the raid, diplomats said.