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DJERBA, Tunisia — Hundreds of Jews were flocking to the Tunisian island of Djerba Wednesday for an annual pilgrimage to Africa's oldest synagogue with security tightened after the Bardo museum massacre and warnings of extremist attacks.

Barriers have been erected on access routes to Djerba in southern Tunisia and police checkpoints set up around Hara Kbira, the Jewish district of the island, an AFP journalist said.

The number of pilgrims visiting the Ghriba synagogue has fallen sharply since a 2002 suicide bombing claimed by Al Qaeda that killed 21.

This year's visit follows a March 18 attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, claimed by the Islamic State group, which killed 21 foreign tourists and a Tunisian policeman.

"There is a lot of security, there are soldiers and police everywhere and that is very reassuring to us," said Lorine Bendayan, who made this year's trip from France.

Apart from Tunisian pilgrims, some 500 others are expected in Djerba for the two-day religious festival from France, Israel, Italy and Britain, according to the organisers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that his country had learned of "concrete threats" of terror attacks against Jewish or Israeli targets in the North African country, prompting a quick denial from Tunis.

But many of the Jewish pilgrims at Djerba on Wednesday were defiant.

"We are not afraid. We don't care what Israel has warned," said Bendayan.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Interior Minister Najem Gharsalli said the warning was unfounded and accused Israel of trying to "damage the reputation of Tunisia".

And during a visit to Djerba two days earlier, he insisted: "Tunisia is a safe country and Djerba too is a safe city. Visitors from the world over are welcome.”

"What I am saying now is a response to many who cast doubt over Tunisia's security and its capacity to secure celebrations."

'Many people are afraid'

Pilgrims visit the tombs of famous rabbis for the Lag BaOmer Jewish festival, including on Djerba island, where one of the last Jewish communities in the Arab world still lives.

It is believed the Ghriba synagogue was founded in 586 BC by Jews fleeing the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

Tunisian Jews now number around 1,500, compared with an estimated 100,000 when the country gained independence from France in 1956.

Authorities have been struggling to reassure foreign visitors they will be safe in the wake of the Bardo killings, which have hit its key tourism sector that accounts for 7 per cent of the country's GDP.

Tourism was already suffering from the fallout of Tunisia's 2011 revolution and organisers say the few hundred Jewish visitors expected for this year's Djerba pilgrimage are a far cry from the 8,000 or so who made the trip before 2002.

"Before the [Bardo] attack we were expecting a return of pilgrims [to pre-2002 levels]," pilgrimage official Rene Trabelsi told local radio.

"After the attack — and this is only logical and normal — many people are afraid."

KHARTOUM — Sudan's anti-aircraft defences shot at an unidentified object that crossed the sky near Khartoum late on Tuesday, the army said, denying that explosions heard in the capital were related to an attack or coup attempt.

Residents of Omdurman, part of greater Khartoum, told Reuters they had heard at least one explosion around 2200 local time coming from north of the Khartoum metropolitan area.

"The anti-air defences in the Wadi Sidna military zone confronted a bright target late last night," a statement on the Sudanese armed forces website quoted spokesman Colonel Sawarmi Khaled Saad as saying.

"The official spokesman would like to reassure citizens that the situation is fully under control, denying reports that there was an alleged coup attempt, or military clashes or external attack."

Sudan faces insurgencies in the western region of Darfur and along its border with South Sudan, though the rebels are not believed to have air capabilities.

It has blamed Israel for such attacks in the past, including an air strike in 2012 that caused a huge explosion and fire at an arms factory in Khartoum, but Israel has either refused to comment or said it neither admitted nor denied involvement.

A senior military source said that, in Tuesday's incident, two missiles followed by artillery were fired towards a "an unidentified flying object".

"Nothing has yet been found... The search is still ongoing at the site," he added.

The insurgents tried to derail voting in conflict-hit areas of the country for an election in April that extended by five years the quarter-century rule of President Omar Hassan Al Bashir. Most opposition parties boycotted the poll.

GENEVA — The number of people displaced within their own countries was the worst in a generation last year, but there is little sign of governments taking action to deal with the problem, the Norwegian Refugee Council said on Wednesday.

"Every single day last year 30,000 men, women and children were forced out of their homes because of conflict and violence," the agency's Secretary General Jan Egeland told a news conference in Geneva.

The total number of displaced rose by 11 million to a record 38 million. That does not include people who left their country and became refugees abroad, although many of today's displaced become tomorrow's refugees, he said.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR has yet to compile refugee figures for 2014, but it put the total at 16.7 million at the end of 2013, and the number has grown since then.

Egeland, a former top humanitarian official at the United Nations, was launching a report on displacement in 60 countries. Six out of every 10 people displaced in 2014 were in just five countries: Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria.

Syria was now "the number one displacement country of this generation", with 7.6 million internally displaced and 4 million refugees, but stopping the problem was possible, Egeland said.

"It's as difficult and as simple to say United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey: you have to sit down and send one signal into this conflict: stop it. You have to get your side to go to the negotiating table, and not just talk about the other side."

Egeland said none of the humanitarian appeals for the main countries with displacement in 2015 — Iraq, Syria, Central African Republic and South Sudan — was more than 20 per cent funded.

"So, in some cases, it is not only the brutality of the armed men who make people move, it can also be the lack of minimum support."

Dealing with the issue required diplomatic, political, economic and social investment by governments, especially the world's major powers with the influence to stop wars, he said.

NANTERRE, France — French judges re-examining the evidence surrounding the 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have concluded their investigations, the prosecutors office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre said Tuesday.

"The judges have closed their dossier and it was sent to the prosecutor on April 30," he said.

The prosecutor now has three months to prepare his submissions on whether to dismiss the case or put it forward to court.

In the meantime interested parties can produce written depositions. However if, as is currently the case, there is no defendant's name attached to the proceedings, the case is likely to be dismissed.

Arafat died aged 75 on November 11, 2004, at the Percy de Clamart hospital, close to Paris. He had been admitted there at the end of October that year after developing stomach pains while at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he had lived since December 2001, surrounded by the Israeli army.

Arafat's widow Suha lodged a complaint at a court in Nanterre in 2012, claiming that her husband was assassinated, sparking the inquiry.

The same year, Arafat's tomb in Ramallah was opened for a few hours allowing three teams of French, Swiss and Russian investigators to collect around 60 samples.

Many Palestinians believe that the Israelis poisoned Arafat with the complicity of some people in his entourage.

A centre in the Swiss city of Lausanne had tested biological samples taken from Arafat's personal belongings given to his widow after his death in Paris, and found "abnormal levels of polonium", but stopped short of saying that he had been poisoned by the extremely radioactive toxin.

However French experts "maintain that the polonium-210 and lead-210 found in Arafat's grave and in the samples are of an environmental nature", Nanterre prosecutor Catherine Denis said last month.

Polonium-210 became famous in 2006 when a fugitive Russian intelligence officer turned opponent of President Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, was killed in London by a strong dose of the hard-to-get radioactive isotope. Two Russian agents were the chief suspects for British police, but Moscow refused their extradition.

The lawyer of Arafat's widow Souha Arafat could not be immediately contacted for comment.

DAMASCUS — Palestinian officials visited Syria for the second time in less than a month on Tuesday to discuss efforts to protect the Yarmouk refugee camp and its residents from the conflict.

A delegation led by Palestine Liberation Organisation official Zakaria Al Agha met with Syria's deputy foreign minister Faisal Muqdad and social affairs minister Kinda Shamat, local PLO official Anwar Abdel Hadi told AFP.

The talks discussed ways to "make the camp neutral so it will be kept out of the conflict in Syria", Abdel Hadi said.

The talks also covered the possibility of expelling all gunmen from the camp and "the need to supply food aid" to both those still in the camp and residents who have sought refuge outside it.

Yarmouk, in southern Damascus, was once a thriving neighbourhood home to some 160,000 residents, both Syrians and Palestinians.

But the camp has been ravaged by Syria's conflict, with a government siege and fighting between regime and rebel forces making life inside virtually unliveable for residents.

Last month, much of the camp was overrun by jihadists from the Daesh group, though they have now been pushed back to the southwest of the Damascus district.

Palestinian factions meanwhile control the north and east part of the camp, with "intermittent clashes between the jihadists and factions", Abdel Hadi said.

The camp's population has shrunk to just 7,000 people, added Abdel Hadi, with thousands of residents who fled the Daesh onslaught now in shelters in the capital.

MOGADISHU — The United States will begin the process of reestablishing a diplomatic mission in Somalia after a more than 20-year break, John Kerry said on Tuesday as he became the first US secretary of state to visit the Horn of Africa nation.

Western nations have poured aid into Somalia to help reconstruction and prevent it from sliding back into the hands of Al Shabab.

An African Union force, AMISOM, supported by US drone strikes, has pushed Al Qaeda-affiliated militant group from its former strongholds, but it uses territory inside the country still under its control to launch attacks there and in Kenya and other neighbouring states.

"In recognition of the progress made and the promise to come, the United States will begin the process of establishing the premises for a diplomatic mission in [the Somali capital] Mogadishu," Kerry said in a statement.

During a three-hour visit inside the perimeter of the city's airport, surrounded by seven-foot walls of sandbags, Kerry met Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the prime minister and provincial leaders.

"While we do not yet have a fixed timeline for reopening the embassy, we are immediately beginning the process of upgrading our diplomatic representation," Kerry said.

In February, Washington named Katherine Dhanani as its ambassador to Somalia, the first since the early 1990s when fighting between warlords plunged the nation into chaos.

The United States pulled its forces out of Somalia after the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" incident when a US helicopter was shot down over Mogadishu, killing 18 soldiers — at that time the deadliest day for the US military since the Vietnam war.

Other Western nations, including Britain, have already opened embassies. For now, Dhanani will make regular trips to Somalia from a base in Nairobi, a US official said.

Kerry said Somalia had made progress but acknowledged more was needed.

In a bid to shore up the government and expand its control, Somalia is due to hold a referendum on a new constitution and a presidential election in 2016. Diplomats say political bickering and government reshuffles have hindered that process.

Somalia's president was previously picked by lawmakers who were themselves nominated, not voted for, by their communities.

A senior State Department official, who briefed reporters ahead of the visit, said Somalia was expected to hold "some form of election" in 2016.

BEIRUT — One of the main hospitals in Syria's northern city of Aleppo has been forced to close indefinitely after being targeted by rockets and barrel bombs, a humanitarian group says.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Monday the private Al Sakhour hospital, serving around 400,000 people as one of the only hospitals in east Aleppo, halted all activities after being bombed twice on consecutive days last week.

"It is unclear when or if the hospital will be operative again" as it was severely damaged, an MSF statement said.

The hospital's staff are Syrian, but it receives medical equipment from MSF every three months, an MSF representative told AFP.

"The next delivery was supposed to be in June, but we don't know if it will happen," he said.

Raquel Ayora, MSF's director of operations, said: "We renew our appeal to the warring parties to respect civilians, health facilities and medical staff.

"These new attacks on medical infrastructures are intolerable."

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, barrel bombs — crude weapons made of old containers packed with explosives — struck near the hospital on April 28 and 30.

MSF said another medical centre in Aleppo closed on April 17 after being repeatedly targeted, and that an air attack on an ambulance last month killed three medical staff, their driver and a civilian.

Al Sakhour hospital was also forced to close for several weeks last summer after air strikes on it, MSF wrote.

In the past, MSF has said "the complexity and danger" of providing aid during the Syrian conflict "are at the highest possible level".

The group has been forced to rein in its efforts in the war-torn country since it has no authorisation to operate in government-controlled areas and no viable go-betweens with representatives of the complex rebel opposition.

The MSF statement said it feared that increased fighting in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib would lead to further attacks on hospitals and medical centres "to increase the suffering of the population".

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, Aleppo city has been split between regime control in the west and rebel control in the east.

Government and opposition forces regularly exchange fire which often kills civilians.

UNITED NATIONS — The United States wants a team of United Nations investigators to determine who is to blame for chemicals weapons attacks in Syria in a bid to pave the way for Security Council action against those responsible, diplomats said on Tuesday.

Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the United States had given him a draft Security Council resolution on the proposal on Monday, which he sent back to Moscow for study. Russia is an ally of Syria and has protected President Bashar Assad from council action during the four-year civil war.

Syria agreed to destroy its chemical weapons program in 2013, but the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has since found chlorine has been "systematically and repeatedly" used as a weapon. The group is not mandated to lay blame.

Government and opposition forces have denied using chlorine.

"The rationale is clear and understandable and we talked with [US Ambassador to the United Nations] Samantha Power about it a long time ago, that there seems to be a missing link," Churkin said. "People are researching the allegations about the use; but accountability, it's not there."

The Security Council threatened in March to take action if toxic chemicals were used again. Ten days later six people were killed in a chlorine attack in Sarmin village, medics said.

Churkin has said there would need to be strong proof of who is to blame for any attacks before the council could act. Russia is one of the 15-member Security Council's five veto powers, along with China, Britain, France and the United States.

The United States said it was actively engaged with UN colleagues on the use of chlorine as a weapon in Syria.

"The Security Council must address the need to determine who is responsible," said a US official. "Doing so is critical to getting justice for the Syrian people and accountability for those who have repeatedly used chemical weapons in Syria."

Chlorine is not prohibited, but its use as a weapon is prohibited under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013. If inhaled, chlorine gas turns to hydrochloric acid in the lungs, which can cause burning and drowning through a reactionary release of fluids.

"We are looking at the [US] proposal and of course we are firmly opposed to any use of chemical weapons," China UN Ambassador Liu Jieyi told Reuters. "It is something that the council will have to take up."

GENEVA — The UN's peace envoy for Syria on Tuesday launched wide-ranging consultations in Geneva with regional and domestic players, including Iran, in a bid to revive stalled talks to end the conflict.

Staffan de Mistura said talks with the Syrian government and some 40 groups, including "political, military actors, women, civil society, victims, the diaspora", would also rope in some 20 regional and international players.

Iran, a key player in the conflict, had been excluded from the stalled Geneva I and Geneva II peace deals. The current dialogue will also include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The consultations would be held on a one-to-one basis between the UN and the separate players. De Mistura's first meeting was with Syrian Ambassador to the UN Hussam Eddin Ala in Geneva.

He said though "low-key", the talks would be "very serious" and could extend beyond a tentative end-June deadline.

"There is no cut-off date," the Swedish-Italian diplomat said, adding: "By the end of June we will assess progress... and decide on the next steps."

The talks could help determine "whether another round of negotiations is feasible down the line, and what a future peaceful Syria may look like”, he said.

Terror-listed entities like Daesh and Al Nusra have not been invited but groups in contact with them are on the list of participants.

De Mistura refused to divulge the identities of the military or other groups he would be talking to.

"We will try to listen to the maximum voices," he said.

"They also include broad representation of the civil society as this process has to speak to the voices of the Syrian people who often are not heard enough.

"This process will be expanded to others as we move along," he said.

'UN will not abandon Syria' 

"The UN will never abandon Syria even if it looks like Mission Impossible," de Mistura said, voicing his "determination" to help find a solution to end the crisis.

Calling the Syrian conflict the "biggest humanitarian tragedy since the World War II," de Mistura said he would "leave no stone unturned" in his bid to try and end the fighting.

The launch of the dialogue comes as rights group Amnesty International accused government forces of crimes against humanity by indiscriminately bombing the country’s former economic powerhouse Aleppo. It also criticised rebels for abuses including war crimes.

De Mistura said the dialogue would be a “stress test as you do with banks” to try and answer the question “What is the situation today?”

More than 220,000 people have been killed in Syria since March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

De Mistura, who was appointed UN envoy for Syria last July, warned the Security Council last week that prospects for a political transition were slim.

In January, he said conditions were not yet right to try to launch more talks after two rounds of negotiations in Switzerland failed.

De Mistura said his predecessors as special Syria envoy — former UN chief Kofi Annan and veteran diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi — who cobbled together the stalled Geneva I and Geneva II peace deals, had “not made any mistakes”, ascribing their failure to what he called “rapid movements on the ground”.

He said both men had advised him “to meet as many people as possible”.

“Within the conflict now, in its fifth year and three years since the adoption of the Geneva communique and no follow up, little if anything has moved,” he said.

“We must redouble efforts in search of a political process. This view is shared by the wider international community.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thunders against a possible nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, his defence chiefs see Tehran's guerrilla allies as a more pressing menace.

Chief among these is Hizbollah, the Lebanese militia that fought the Israeli armed forces to a standstill in their 2006 war and has since expanded its arsenal and honed its skills helping Damascus battle the Syria insurgency.

Ram Ben-Barak, director general of Israel's intelligence ministry, accused Iran on Tuesday of "seeking footholds" from Syria to Yemen to Egypt's Sinai and the Palestinian territories. But he deemed Hizbollah a foe as formidable as the conventional Arab armies that fought Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.

"The only entity that can challenge us with a surprise attack on any scale nowadays is Hizbollah in Lebanon," Ben-Barak told a conference organised by the Israel Defence journal.

Israel believes Hizbollah has more than 100,000 missiles capable of paralysing its civilian infrastructure. Seeking to deter the guerrillas, Israeli generals have threatened to devastate Lebanon should there be another full-on conflict.

In the interim, Lebanese and Syrian security sources report regular Israeli air force sorties as part of an apparent effort to monitor and at times destroy weapons transfers to Hizbollah.

A January 18 air strike that killed an Iranian general and several Hizbollah operatives in Syria’s Golan Heights, northeast of Israel, suggested the Lebanese guerrillas have been setting up a second front close to Jordan, Israel’s security partner.

An Iranian-backed Hizbollah presence in the Golan “will pose a very big problem for us in the future”, Ben-Barak said.

Two Western diplomats who track Israel’s military assessed that it was now busiest securing the Lebanon and Syria borders.

“I don’t think anyone’s looking for escalation, but the potential for this to spiral out of control is high,” one diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

When Israel’s military intelligence chief, Major-General Herzi Halevy, visited Washington in March, as world powers and Iran entered the final stretch of negotiations on curbs to Iran’s nuclear programme, he urged US care not to inadvertently fuel regional instability.

“What he was really interested in getting across was the military threat from groups like Hizbollah, the [Tehran-backed] Houthis in Yemen, and the IRGC Ben-Barak predicted that sanctions relief under the Iran nuclear deal, whose deadline is June 30, would bring Tehran “several hundreds of billions of dollars” which would help it fund its regional allies.

Israel has condemned the proposed deal, under which Iran would scale down its nuclear projects in return for sanctions relief, as not tough enough to remove the risk of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability.