A Danish group on Monday vowed to expand an advertising campaign urging people to boycott products from Israeli settlements after the ads were dropped from Copenhagen buses.

"It's a clear attempt to deny us our freedom of speech," Fathi al-Abed, chairman of the Danish Palestinian Friendship Association, told AFP after bus operator Movia last week pulled the campaign.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday he was confident Israel would investigate violence against the Ethiopian Jewish community after a wave of angry protests in recent days.

"I'm confident that Israeli leadership will work this through in a way that honors the goals, and aspirations and traditions and values of the people of Israel," Kerry told reporters in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

A group of veteran Israeli combatants on Monday slammed the army's conduct during the 2014 Gaza war, using soldiers' testimonies to expose a policy it said caused "unprecedented" civilian casualties.

The testimonies appeared in a 237-page report called "This is how we fought in Gaza" which was based on the anonymous accounts of 60 soldiers and officers involved in the 50-day war last summer.

Israel's outspoken Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Monday his Yisrael Beitenu party would not be joining the coalition government being formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media reports said.

The surprise announcement came just two days before a deadline for Netanyahu to present his new government, which he had hoped would be a rightwing religious lineup with a majority of 67 of the parliament's 120 seats. 

Approval of building plans for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is subject to political considerations, Israeli defense officials have acknowledged.

The admission came as a landmark court case seeks to challenge Israel's housing policy in Area C, which covers 60 percent of the West Bank but is under full Israeli civil and security control.

Israeli security guards shot and wounded a Palestinian after he allegedly tried to stab people waiting at a light railway station in east Jerusalem, police said on Monday.

The attacker, whom police identified as a 35-year-old Palestinian from Shuafat refugee camp in annexed east Jerusalem, was lightly wounded, spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.

Two U.N. peacekeepers were wounded on Monday when mortar rounds fired from Syria hit their base in the Israeli-held sector of the Golan Heights, an army spokesman said.

"Mortar shells hit the Golan in Ein Zivan and in the Zivanit UNDOF base. Two U.N. peacekeeping soldiers were evacuated to Israel for medical care," Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner wrote on his official Twitter account.

Israel on Monday pledged to crack down on racism and discrimination against Ethiopian Jews as officials sought to ease tensions after a series of angry protests over police brutality.

Last week, years of simmering anger within the Ethiopian minority exploded into anger during a protest in Jerusalem sparked by a video showing two police assaulting an Ethiopian soldier in uniform.

Iran is determined to end the "manufactured crisis" over its nuclear program and drafting of a final deal with world powers, though hard, is progressing, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Monday.

The remarks, on Zarif's official Twitter account, came two days after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry denounced what he said was "hysteria" from opponents of an agreement, which is due by June 30.

A Tel Aviv rally of thousands of Ethiopian Israelis against alleged police brutality and institutionalized discrimination turned violent Sunday as clashes erupted between protesters and police, an AFP correspondent said.

Mounted police used riot dispersal methods to prevent groups of demonstrators from storming the Tel Aviv municipality.