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.

Suspected Jewish extremists have torched a vehicle in a West Bank village and scrawled racist graffiti on a nearby wall, Palestinians and Israelis said Tuesday.

The pickup truck was totally destroyed, and a tractor belonging to the same owner was damaged by flames in the incident at Beit Ummar village, north of the city Hebron.

President Shimon Peres on Sunday urged Israel to resume peace talks with the Palestinians, saying their president Mahmoud Abbas was a willing partner with whom an agreement could be reached.

Speaking with Israeli diplomats at his Jerusalem residence, Peres said the only way the Jewish state could positively affect the fluctuating reality in the region was "to complete the peace agreement with the Palestinians."

The head of Israel's ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, ex-foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, lashed out Friday against Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, saying new peace talks would be possible only if he leaves office.

"Only after his disappearance from the leadership of the Palestinian Authority will it be possible to renew the diplomatic process," Haaretz daily's website quoted him as saying in a statement.

Israeli troops Friday arrested a Palestinian policeman as he tried to pass through an Israeli military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian security source told AFP.

He said that soldiers detained Firas Abu Aziz, 27, as he was on his way home to the village of Yata, near the southern city of Hebron. The Israeli army could not confirm or deny the report.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned Thursday that he would disband his Palestinian Authority if there was no Israeli movement toward renewing peace talks after Israel's elections on January 22.

Abbas, in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, said that if such a situation arose he would hand full responsibility for the occupied West Bank to the Israeli government.

A delegation of pro-Palestinian activists, mainly French and Egyptian, crossed into Gaza from Egypt on Thursday to deliver aid, AFP correspondents at the border reported.

The "Welcome to Palestine" delegation of about 90 people is to stay in the territory until January 1, in solidarity with the people of Gaza and in protest against the Israeli blockade in force since 2006, organizers say.

Three Israeli settlers in the West Bank were on Thursday charged in Beersheva district court with carrying out a "price-tag" attack against Palestinian property, the justice ministry said.

According to the charge-sheet, the three men, in their 20s, drove to the West Bank village al Asja, northeast of Dhahiriya in the southern Hebron hills, on December 2.

The Shin Bet internal security service has arrested 10 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine accused of planning to kidnap Israelis, the agency said on Tuesday.

The arrests were made several months earlier but a media blackout was imposed.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket into southern Israel on Sunday for the first time since an Egypt-mediated ceasefire on November 21, Israel's army radio and other media reported.

The reports said it fell on open ground and caused no injuries, but an Israeli military spokesman denied that a rocket had hit.