A wealthy Canadian-Jordanian businessman, who was invited to the West Bank for an investment conference, has been arrested by Israel and held without legal advice, his lawyer said Monday.

According to Avi BarAm, Ibrahim Siyyam tried to cross from Jordan into the West Bank with a group of businessmen earlier this month but was detained by Israel's Shin Bet internal security agency and questioned without access to a lawyer.

Pope Francis's reference to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas as "an angel of peace" was meant as encouragement for him to pursue peace with Israel, the Vatican said Monday, after the words whipped up controversy on social media.

The pope often presents heads of states with a large bronze medallion representing an "angel of peace", and did so when he met Abbas on Saturday, when he used the phrase in remarks addressed to the president, according to journalists present.

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.

Israeli nationalists and police clashed with Palestinians in occupied east Jerusalem on Sunday as crowds of Jewish hardliners marched across the city to mark the 48th anniversary of its capture.

Known as Jerusalem Day, the anniversary marks the seizure in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexation of mainly Arab east Jerusalem in a move never recognized by the international community.

Pope Francis met Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas on Saturday, calling him "an angel of peace," days after the Vatican said it was preparing to sign its first accord with Palestine to the anger of Israel.

Abbas met the pontiff for about 20 minutes for a private audience, a meeting that comes a day before the pope is due to canonize two Palestinian nuns, who will become the first Palestinian Arabs to gain sainthood.

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.

Israeli soldiers fired tear gas, rubber and live bullets at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Friday, wounding at least 21 people, medics and security sources said.

Clashes took place near Ramallah and farther north in Nablus, after a new Israeli cabinet took office and as Palestinians marked 67 years since the "Nakba", or "catastrophe" that befell them when Israel was established in 1948.

The U.S. Congress on Thursday sent President Barack Obama a bill to give lawmakers the power to review and potentially reject a nuclear deal with Iran.

The House overwhelmingly passed the measure, 400-25, a reflection of lawmakers' insistence on having a say in what could be a significant international accord to get Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

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.