Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced Monday to eight months in prison for unlawfully accepting money from a U.S. supporter, capping the dramatic downfall of a man who only years earlier led the country and hoped to bring about a historic peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Olmert was convicted in March in a retrial in Jerusalem District Court. The sentencing comes in addition to a six-year prison sentence he received last year in a separate bribery conviction, ensuring the end of the former premier's political career.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his "appreciation" to the United States for opposing an Arab plan for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, an Israeli official said.

The Jewish state is believed to be the only country in the region that has an atomic bomb although it has never confirmed its nuclear military capacity.

A senior official in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party on Friday rejected fresh U.S. criticism of the premier as unjustified and hypocritical.

Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of the influential foreign affairs and defense committee in parliament, was responding to remarks by U.S. President Barack Obama published Thursday in news magazine The Atlantic.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to mend fences with Israel's Arabs at a meeting Thursday with the head of the Arab parties in parliament, Ayman Odeh, after polarizing election-day remarks.

Netanyahu had caused an uproar when during the March 17 vote he warned that Arabs were being mobilized "in droves" to the ballot boxes, putting his rightwing rule at risk.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have the final say in future peace talks with the Palestinians, an official said Tuesday, after Interior Minister Silvan Shalom was entrusted to oversee negotiations.

"The prime minister is responsible for the negotiations. Silvan Shalom will be holding the meetings with the Palestinians along with Yitzhak Molcho, the personal envoy of the premier," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has handed responsibility for any future peace talks with the Palestinians to his new Interior Minister Silvan Shalom, an official said Monday.

"The prime minister has charged Silvan Shalom with conducting in his name the negotiations with the Palestinians," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday there was still time to stop an Iranian agreement with world powers that he says would give Tehran nuclear arms.

"It's still not too late to retract the plan that gives Iran an agreement which will pave it a road to a nuclear weapon," he said at a ceremony marking Israel's capture of Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin on Sunday denounced racism against the country's Ethiopian Jews who have complained of alleged police brutality and institutionalized discrimination.

"There is no place for racism and discrimination in (our) society, none," Netanyahu said at the annual commemoration for around 4,000 Jews who died while trying to flee their homeland for Israel in the early 1980s.

After weeks of coalition wrangling, Benjamin Netanyahu started his fourth term as Israeli premier Friday, but he faces an even tougher task to mend fences with the United States and Europe.

Soon after its narrow approval by parliament late Thursday, the new rightwing government was warned by Washington that it must forge a deal with the Palestinians for its own good.

The Israeli parliament late Thursday narrowly approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government as the United States insisted the Jewish state must forge a deal with the Palestinians for its own good.

The new administration marks a shift to the right and looks likely to complicate Netanyahu's fraught relationships with the Palestinians and with U.S. President Barack Obama.