The Vatican said Wednesday it was preparing to sign its first accord with Palestine, two years after officially recognizing it as a state.

"The bilateral commission of the Holy See and the State of Palestine, which is working on a comprehensive agreement" on the life and activity of the Catholic Church in Palestine, is putting the final touches to the treaty, the Vatican said.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday it has recorded a population of 12.1 million people, of whom 4.6 million live in the occupied territories and the remainder abroad.

The figures show that at the end of 2014, 2.8 million Palestinians lived in the West Bank and 1.8 million in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli troops shot and seriously wounded a 17-year-old Palestinian in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, medics said.

The youth, whose name was not immediately released, was hit in the head north of Beit Lahiya near the border with Israel, Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said in a statement.

An Israeli court on Wednesday sentenced an east Jerusalem Palestinian to 30 years in prison for 10 counts of attempted murder, court documents showed.

Aziz Oweissat, 50, was found guilty of attempts including an ax attack on a 73-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish man near Jerusalem's Old City and the detaching of gas pipes at several homes in the city with the aim of blowing up their Israeli occupants.

French judges re-examining the evidence surrounding the 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have concluded their investigations, the prosecutors office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre said Tuesday.

"The judges have closed their dossier and it was sent to the prosecutor on April 30," he said.

A Danish group on Monday vowed to expand an advertising campaign urging people to boycott products from Israeli settlements after the ads were dropped from Copenhagen buses.

"It's a clear attempt to deny us our freedom of speech," Fathi al-Abed, chairman of the Danish Palestinian Friendship Association, told AFP after bus operator Movia last week pulled the campaign.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter on Saturday urged Palestinians to hold elections to end the de facto division of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Islamist-run Gaza Strip.

He was speaking at a joint news conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the Palestinian political capital Ramallah in the West Bank.

Some 2,000 Arab Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv Tuesday against a wave of house demolitions, capping a day in which Arab shops, schools and businesses observed a general strike.

The protesters gathered at Rabin Square in the center of Israel's commercial capital, waving Palestinian flags and wearing headscarves as police officers stood by in case of disturbances.

Israeli authorities invited tenders on Monday for the construction of 77 homes in settlement neighborhoods of annexed east Jerusalem, settlement watchdog Peace Now said.

Peace Now spokeswoman Hagit Ofran told Agence France Presse it was the first such announcement in east Jerusalem since a March 17 general election win by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party.

In the face of strong competition from China, the traditional, locally produced Palestinian headscarf has put up a show of resistance, successfully pulling itself back from the brink of extinction.

Thanks to the business sense of two brothers from the southern West Bank city of Hebron, the traditional black-and-white keffiyeh headscarf has discovered a new lease of life.