“Israel’s policy of retaliation is forceful and decisive,” the PM said during the weekly government meeting in Jerusalem, asserting that Israel would “retaliate decisively against any attack on our citizens and soldiers.”

“The United States needs to understand that the atmosphere it created in the Middle East, that Washington is now less friendly to Israel, isn’t making the Palestinians more willing to compromise, it further adds to their rejection of the peace process.”

Mr Netanyahu said that “the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building it today”. “Jerusalem is not a settlement, it’s our capital,” he said in Washington.

Settlements in occupied East Jerusalem were an “inextricable” part of the city, he said, and would remain part of Israel under any peace agreement.

Several dozen Palestinian women scuffled with Israeli troops on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Saturday amid rising religious and political tensions in the disputed city. At one point, a firebomb hit a military jeep and soldiers rushed to extinguish the fire.

As the women withdrew, Palestinian teens threw stones at soldiers who closed the crossing to traffic.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday that Israel’s decision to add two West Bank sites to the national heritage list is a dangerous provocation that may bring about a religious war, Israel Radio reported. In a speech to the parliament in Brussels, Abbas said Israel’s attempt to steal the Palestinian heritage is part of a larger scheme to take over religious Muslim sites.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem would both be added to the list of national heritage sites that the government plans to promote.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said yesterday the Palestinians had decided to turn to the U.N. Security Council to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.

Separately, the negotiator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Obama administration is “totally on board” with a plan by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to create a state on the pre-1967 borders within two years.

Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the “sole objective” of the seized Iranian weapons shipment “was to attack and kill as many civilians – women, children and the elderly – as possible. This is a war crime.”

Netanyahu added: “This is what the international community should concentrate on at all times – but especially today. But instead, they have chosen to assemble and condemn the IDF and the State of Israel, and to try and undermine our legitimate right to defend ourselves.”

Although coastal, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv has a bustling gay scene, open homosexuality is less welcome in conservative areas. Annual gay pride parades in Jerusalem meet with often violent protests from ultra-Orthodox Jews, who view homosexuality as an abomination against God.

But Nitzan Horowitz, an openly gay legislator, said he had no doubt there was a connection between the killings and what he termed incitement against the gay community in Israel.