The new Netanyahu-Mofaz coalition got off to a rocky start this week with major disputes over a new law on national service for yeshivah students and the future of settler outposts in the West Bank.

Sean Penn is to visit Israel as part of his work for humanitarian aid organisations.

The actor, who is on screen this year as the rock-star son of a Holocaust survivor in This Must be the Place.

The announcement follows a meeting involving Mr Penn and IOsrael's deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon in Los Angeles last week.

Syria and Iran have been ordered by a US court to pay £200 million to the family of a Florida teenager who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in a Tel Aviv.

Daniel Wultz was 16 when he was killed in the Islamic Jihad attack on a restaurant during the Pesach holiday. Eleven people died in the blast, and Daniel's father, Yekutiel, was severely wounded.

Israel’s disgraced former president has been denied an appeal hearing in his rape case.
Moshe Katzav.

Nearly five years after he resigned from the presidency in the wake of the allegations against him, Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut ruled that the points raised by katzav’s legal team did not warrant another hearing.

A British-born lacrosse player is hoping to fulfil a dream this summer and compete on Israel's behalf in the European Championships.

Tash Kalmanson, who moved to Israel last year and is studying for an MA in Jewish studies at Tel Aviv University, has been selected to play on the Israeli woman's team at the competition in Amsterdam in June.

A bloody weekend in which five Israelis were murdered has shocked the nation and left the police, the government and the school system scrambling to provide answers to the public.

Late on Friday night in Beersheva, Gadi Vichman, 36, was having trouble getting his two-year-old daughter to sleep because of the noise coming from a group of youths drinking in the courtyard below.

British audiences will soon be able to fill the gap left by the series end of the Israeli-inspired drama Homeland, at a new festival celebrating highlights of Israel's small and big screens.

On June 14 the inaugural London Israeli Film & Television Festival will open, giving British viewers a rare glimpse of the work of Israel's directors, writers and actors.

The political earthquake that shook Israel in the middle of the night this week has sent shockwaves well beyond the confines of the Knesset.

Benjamin Netanyahu is now one of the most powerful prime ministers ever to lead Israel, and many commentators are wondering if he is now sufficiently empowered to alter the course of Middle East history.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz's closest political advisers spent last weekend putting together teams to fight an election campaign over the coming summer - at the same time as they were fleshing out a deal to form a national-unity coalition.

While the two leaders were receiving updates on the talks - which included an agreement to postpone elections by over a year - they continued to behav

Plans for early elections to Israel's Knesset have been cancelled after the Prime Minister announced that his Likud Party had formed a coalition with its main opposition party.

It was revealed early on Tuesday morning that Likud would bring the Kadima Party into government.

The brother of the assassin who shot Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was greeted with furious demonstrations after his release from prison this week.

A meteoric, 13-year parliamentary career which twice brought Tzipi Livni to the brink of Israel's premiership, came to an end on Tuesday, when the former leader of Kadima announced she was resigning from the Knesset "but not leaving public life".

In a press conference at the Knesset, she said: "I respect the decision of the Kadima voters and I wish Shaul [Mofaz] good luck.

Benzion Netanyahu, the pre-eminent historian of Jewish medieval Spain, who died on Monday at his home in Jerusalem, aged 102, was the man who most influenced the political outlook and ideology of his son, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Born in Warsaw in 1910, Benzion Mileikowski was the son of a Zionist rabbi and writer who moved his family in 1920 to Jerusalem, where Benzion went on to stu