Germany's foreign minister said on Saturday his country was prepared to help create conditions for a resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Guido Westerwelle, on a two-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, was quoted by a foreign ministry statement as saying "Germany is ready to help create a climate of confidence" that would permit talks to resume.

A Palestinian youth was killed when a tunnel linking Egypt to the Gaza Strip collapsed on Saturday, Palestinian medical sources said.

"Mussa Ghonaim, 26 years old, was killed in the tunnel collapse south of the town of Rafah," the sources said.

Middle East peace will prove impossible without Palestinian unity, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Friday, suggesting Ankara could help reconcile the Fatah and Hamas parties.

"The process of unity between Fatah and Hamas, this has to be achieved," Erdogan told a Washington think tank during a visit to the United States.

Visiting German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle on Friday reaffirmed his country's friendship for Israel in "challenging times" for the region, as tensions mount over the Syrian conflict.

"I want to underline that in these challenging times Germany stands alongside its Israeli partners," Westerwelle said at the start of talks in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling his host a "dear friend."

Protesters and Israel forces clashed in the West Bank on Wednesday as thousands of Palestinians commemorated the Nakba (catastrophe) of the Jewish state's creation in 1948, during which 760,000 Palestinians fled their homes.

Soldiers fired rubber bullets at protesters gathered in front of Ofer military prison near Ramallah, wounding 15 of them, Palestinian medical officials said.

The International Criminal Court has opened a preliminary probe into Israel's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010, the prosecutor's office said Tuesday.

"My office will be conducting a preliminary examination in order to establish whether the criteria for opening an investigation are met," Fatou Bensouda said in a statement issued from the court based in The Hague.

Vandals believed to be Jewish extremists desecrated graves and damaged property in a Palestinian village in the West Bank on Monday, Palestinian and Israeli officials said.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official responsible for the northern West Bank, told Agence France Presse that vandals entered the village of Al-Sawiya, south of Nablus in the early hours of the morning.

Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the northern West Bank hurled stones at each other on Saturday after the settlers marched into the village of Burin, witnesses said.

One villager was slightly hurt in the hand by a stone and another passed out from tear gas fired by troops trying to separate the two sides, an Agence France Presse journalist said.

EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said Friday she is worried about mounting tensions in East Jerusalem and the West Bank after conflicting messages from Israel on settlement activity.

"The High Representative is concerned by developments over the past week in East Jerusalem and the West Bank which have increased tensions on the ground and risk undermining current efforts to re-launch peace talks," her office in Brussels said in a statement.

Israeli "segregation policies" have caused deep economic isolation and left more than 80 percent of Palestinian children in east Jerusalem wallowing in poverty, the U.N. said in a report published Thursday.

"Palestinian poverty in Jerusalem has risen steadily over the last decade," the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said in a statement.