Secretary of State John Kerry plans to make a last-ditch effort this weekend to convince Israel to restart stalled peace talks before President Barack Obama leaves office, CNN has learned.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fly to Rome on Sunday to try to fend off pressure from the United States and Europe over his settlements policy and opposition to a French-led effort to forge peace with the Palestinians.

Two members of the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee – one chosen by Hillary Clinton and the other picked by Bernie Sanders – on Thursday issued a joint call to action to push panel members to change the party’s platform on Israel.

 
(Read FMEP President Matt Duss’s testimony to the platform committee here.)

In interview with Haaretz, David Friedman, candidate’s co-adviser on Israeli affairs, says Trump doesn’t believe Palestinian state is ‘an American imperative.’ He’s also not concerned over possibility of binational state: ‘Nobody really knows how many Palestinians live there.’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of spreading a blood libel in his address Thursday to the European Parliament in Brussels. In the speech, which earned a standing ovation from parliament representatives, Abbas alleged that Israeli rabbis called this week for the poisoning of Palestinian water, a report for which he provided no citation and which echoes medieval anti-Semitic libels.

“The inaccessibility of Israel’s military procedures means Palestinians are often forced to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the occupation in the dark,” writes Natasha Roth.