A slender majority of Israelis support the creation of a separate Palestinian state, but did not have high hopes for a peace deal, a survey said on Friday.

The survey by daily Israel Hayom asked more than 800 Israelis "do you support or oppose the idea of two states for two peoples, i.e. the creation of a Palestinian state independent from Israel?"

Hundreds of thousands of supporters of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party on Friday held their first mass rally in Gaza since Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007, according to a Fatah spokesman.

Hamas, in a sign of reconciliation with Fatah, permitted the rally to go ahead as the climax of a week of Gaza festivities celebrating the 48th anniversary of Fatah taking up arms against Israel.

A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago.

On Thursday Israel's National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records.

As Lebanon continues to overlook the potential to turn its cannabis cultivation problem into a profitable project that can improve the living conditions of farmers in the Bekaa region, many farms in Israel are challenging the illegality of marijuana in the state to test and promote its medical advantages.

“Situated in the Galilee hills in northern Israel is a government-approved medical marijuana farm that among its strain of growing plants there is one that is believed to have the strongest psychoactive effect of any cannabis in the world. Another, rich in anti-inflammatory properties, will not get you high at all,” the New York Times reported.

Sofia has identified and issued an arrest warrant for one of several foreigners believed to have assisted a man who killed six people plus himself in a bomb attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in July, a senior investigator was quoted as saying Thursday.

"The investigation has evidence for the implication of three persons. The identity of one of them has already been established," Stanelia Karadzhova, head of the regional investigation unit in Burgas where the bombing took place, told the 24 Hours newspaper in an interview.

Israelis troops installed on Thursday more surveillance equipment along the fence that separates the Lebanese-Israeli border, the state-run National News Agency reported.

NNA said that a several member patrol set up advanced monitoring cameras at the separation wall at the Fatima gate in the border town of Kfarkila.

The United States Wednesday urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to resume direct talks in 2013 and move toward peace.

"As we turn the calendar to 2013... now is the time for leaders on both sides to display real leadership, to focus on the work that's necessary to return to direct negotiations," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said on Wednesday that the final section of a security fence along the border with Egypt's barren Sinai should be finished by the end of March.

Netanyahu on Wednesday attended a ceremony marking the completion of 230 kilometers (144 miles) of the barrier, with just over seven miles still to go, in the vicinity of the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

Around 500 Bedouin Palestinians were temporarily evacuated from their homes in the Jordan Valley on Wednesday as the Israeli army carried out exercises, residents and the army said.

An AFP photographer at the scene saw dozens of people being evacuated in the Wadi al-Maleh area in the north of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.

The militant Islamic Hamas could wrest the West Bank from the western-backed rule of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, just as it did in the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

"Everyone knows that Hamas could take over the Palestinian Authority," a statement from Netanyahu's office quoted him as telling members of a Jewish bible study circle meeting at his Jerusalem residence.