Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he would stress the need to halt Iran's nuclear program when he meets U.S. President Barack Obama later this month.

Speaking at a meeting of his cabinet, Netanyahu said he would meet Obama before addressing the United Nations in New York.

Iran's new nuclear chief said Monday that Tehran was "optimistic" about upcoming talks with world powers, offering "enhanced" but unspecified cooperation with the U.N. atomic agency.

"I have come here with a message of my newly elected president to further enhance and expand our ongoing cooperation with the (U.N. atomic) agency and with the aim to put an end to the so-called Iran nuclear file," Ali Akbar Salehi said.

Iranian President Hasan Rowhani warned Monday of a Western campaign to transform the Arab world to suit the interests of Israel, with the Syria conflict part of the plot.

Rowhani, seen as a moderate in the Islamic republic, made the remarks at a meeting with commanders of the hardline Revolutionary Guards focused on the conflict in Syria, which is Iran's key regional ally.

A semiofficial news agency in Iran says hackers gained access to the Facebook page of the country's foreign minister and made comments about the country's 2009 election.

The report Saturday by Fars quotes Marzieh Afkham, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, saying Mohammad Javad Zarif's Facebook page had been hacked.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's media savvy foreign minister, has become the first Iranian official to have a verified account on Twitter, although no one inside the country can legally read his tweets.

In fact technically it is illegal for Zarif to have a Twitter account at all.

Iran's new centrist leader Hasan Rowhani on Friday urged Moscow to help solve Tehran's nuclear crisis as he met President Vladimir Putin for a key meeting at a security summit in Kyrgzystan.

"As far as the Iranian nuclear problem is concerned, we would like this problem to be solved as soon as possible within the framework of international norms," Rowhani told Putin in televised remarks translated into Russian in Bishkek.

France has reassured President Michel Suleiman that a possible Western attack against the Syrian regime would neither target Lebanon nor Hizbullah, As Safir daily reported on Friday.

The daily's correspondent in Paris said French President Francois Hollande told Suleiman on the sidelines of the Francophone Games in the southern city of Nice that Paris was exerting all efforts to steer Lebanon clear of the developments linked to Syria and its chemical weapons.

Iran's new envoy to the U.N. atomic agency said Thursday that Tehran had a "strong political will" to engage with the international community over its nuclear program.

But speaking at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Reza Najafi said diplomacy was a two-way street and that Iran would never give up its nuclear "rights", echoing new President Hasan Rowhani.

As Washington and Moscow discuss a Russian plan to rid Syria of chemical weapons, an Israeli official said Thursday that the existing Chemical Weapons Convention has not been a regional success.

The 20-year-old convention, which has been proposed as the tool for verifying Syrian compliance, has failed to attract the multilateral support that would allow it to work, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, adding that Israel signed in 1993 but has never ratified it.

The survivors of a mass killing in an Iraqi camp housing Iranian exiles were moved during the night to another camp on the edge of Baghdad, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The Iraqi authorities ordered the transfer of the 42 in the wake of violence in Camp Ashraf in the central Iraq province of Diyala on September 2 in which 52 members of the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran died.