Seven Israelis were killed in a string of coordinated attacks in southern Israel Thursday, and hours later the Israeli military hit back with angry air raids on Gaza militants it said were responsible.

The bloodshed, which killed six civilians and a soldier on two desert roads near the Red Sea resort town of Eilat, prompted a wave of international condemnation led by the White House.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr stressed Cairo’s keenness on political stability in Lebanon and called for the participation of all political parties in Lebanese decision-making.

Following talks with Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat on Tuesday, Amr said that “the only way to achieve stability is to guarantee the participation of all political players in the governing structure in Lebanon based on their real representation.”

One Palestinian was killed and seven wounded in at least four overnight Israeli air strikes across the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medics said on Tuesday.

The Israeli military said its aircraft had targeted four areas in the Gaza Strip in response to the firing of a Grad rocket from the Palestinian territory into southern Israel.

Tucked away in an alley in one of Cairo's oldest quarters, Nasser Mustafa painstakingly welds small metal pieces that will come together to form a traditional lantern.

Egyptians turn to the lantern, known as a fanoos, as part of the tradition of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset in a process intended to light one's path toward prayer and God.

Egypt's ousted president Hosni Mubarak, bound to a stretcher and caged, appeared in court on Monday before the judge announced a three-week adjournment and an end to live television broadcasts.

The judge, Ahmed Refaat, also decided that the trial of Mubarak and his former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, would be merged, as demanded by the lawyers of families of those killed in Egypt's January-February uprising.

Egypt's military prosecution on Sunday detained activist and blogger Asma Mahfouz for questioning for allegedly defaming the military council on Facebook and Twitter, the official MENA news agency reported.

Mahfouz -- one of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution that unseated former president Hosni Mubarak -- was released on bail of 20,000 pounds (around 3,300 dollars, 2,300 euros) but the investigation continues, MENA said.

A Jordanian and an Israeli are to go on trial in Egypt on charges of spying for the Jewish state's intelligence services, the state news agency MENA said on Sunday.

The telecoms engineer from Jordan and the Israeli "officer with the Mossad" spy agency are to go on trial in Egypt's state security court on charges of having worked "to damage the national interests of Egypt," it said.

Egyptian tanks were rolling into a town near Gaza's border on Saturday for an anticipated operation against militants who attacked a gas pipeline to Israel and police stations, security officials said.

The officials said the tanks and more than 1,000 soldiers and policemen, deployed on Friday and Saturday, would try to restore order to a lawless section in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, and then move southwards to a mountainous region where armed outlaws were hiding.

Egypt on Friday blasted Israel's approval of 1,600 new homes in an east Jerusalem settlement as a "major obstacle" to the start of new peace talks with the Palestinians.

"We cannot accept this, we condemn it categorically," Foreign Minister Mohammed Amr said in Berlin during his first European visit since taking office last month, according to remarks translated into German by an interpreter.

A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: the sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.

An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.