Israel on Monday halted all cooperation and barred entry to a United Nations mission summoned to investigate alleged human rights abuses against West Bank Palestinians.

The directive, initiated at the behest of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, also includes not answering calls from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), officials told Xinhua on Monday.

"They do not work with us, systematically," foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said of the rationale behind the step.

"Our work with them is useless; all they do is to adopt a disproportionate amount of anti-Israel resolutions as if there was nothing else in the world, and they have made all cooperation useless," Palmor said.

A ministry statement slammed what Palmor characterized as the group's "obsessive" focus on Israel, while turning a blind eye to governmental violence routinely employed against residents in neighboring countries.

"While all over the Middle East human rights are violated in an unprecedented scale, the HRC ridicules itself by dedicating its time and resources to establish a superfluous and extravagant body whose sole purpose is to satisfy the Palestinians' whims and to harm future chances to reach an agreement through peaceful means," the statement read.

"The secretariat of the human rights council and (commissioner) Nabi Pilawai sparked this process by establishing an international investigative committee on settlements, and we will thus not work with them anymore and will not appear before the council," an official told the Ha'aretz daily on Monday.

"We have many resources but we will act with discretion and will not shoot from the hip," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told Israel Radio a day earlier, alluding to measures to be employed to scuttle the planned probe.

The government's "group of eight" senior ministers on Sunday considered punitive measures against the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) over the HRC's decision to send a team.

While the result of that session were not announced, withholding tax revenues that Israel collects on behalf of the PNA are among the steps that were considered at the weekly cabinet session in Jerusalem.

Israel also warned that it may halt joint economic projects with the PNA and recall its HRC envoy.