JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the civil war in Syria and stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts will top the agenda of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

“It is a very important visit that will emphasize the strong alliance between Israel and the United States,” Netanyahu, who has had a testy relationship with Obama, told his cabinet.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on Thursday with Yair Lapid, the surprise runner-up in an election last month, to try to draw him into a broad government that could bridge Israel’s religious divide.

In the January 22 ballot, centrist candidate Lapid’s rallying cry, “equal sharing of the burden”, touched a nerve among voters angered by military exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox students and state stipends for large, religious families.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s Health Ministry has ordered doctors to review how they prescribe a birth control drug, after accusations it was being used to control the population of Ethiopian immigrants.

Suspicions that Ethiopian women had been coerced into receiving Depo-Provera arose in Israeli media a few years ago and most recently in a TV documentary linking the community’s falling birthrate to over-prescription of the injectable contraceptive.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s parliament, long heavy with retired generals, is getting a new look, with a freshman class that includes two youth protest leaders, an Ethiopian immigrant, a high tech millionaire and more women than ever.

Thanks to the surprise second place finish of a new centrist party, as well as the success of a new far-right group, the 120-member Knesset will have a record 47 first time lawmakers and a record 26 women, including a West Bank settler mother of 11.

MACCABIM, Israel (Reuters) – Yehudit Shimshi had fire in her eyes after she voted in a leafy Israeli suburb on Tuesday, but resignation in her voice.

Her hope for an end to the “reign” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forlorn, she admitted.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an election-eve appeal on Monday to wavering supporters to “come home”, showing concern over a forecast far-right surge that would keep him in power but weaken him politically.

In the last stretch of a largely lackluster campaign that could produce the most hardline government in Israel’s history, Netanyahu has watched high-tech millionaire Naftali Bennett’s far-right Jewish Home party chip away at his right-wing Likud’s opinion poll lead.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks set to form a new governing coalition after next week’s election, polls show, with the only question being whether he wants to soften its hard-line contours.

No one party has ever won a majority in parliament in a parliamentary election in Israel, and Tuesday’s ballot could be followed by weeks of coalition-building negotiations.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – It’s Bibi against the world on a campaign trail that took the combative Israeli prime minister to a Jewish settlement on Tuesday.

Enjoying a wide opinion poll lead before a January 22 election, Benjamin Netanyahu has been lecturing the international community – vocal in its criticism of settlement expansion on occupied territory and his hints of military action against Iran – about what it should really be worried about.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scrambled on Sunday to hold back an opinion-poll surge by a far-right party, appealing in rare radio interviews for his supporters to stand by him in the January 22 election.

There is little doubt in Israel that Netanyahu’s conservative Likud, running jointly with former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist Yisrael Beitenu, will win the highest number of parliamentary seats in the coming ballot.

JERUSALEM/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Israel moved ahead with plans to build 3,000 settler homes in one of the most sensitive areas of the West Bank, as the European Union summoned Israel’s envoy to add its voice to a storm of international protest.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday the global condemnation, some of it from the Jewish state’s closest traditional allies, would not deter it from defending its “vital interests”.