Region

GAZA/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A ceasefire agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians aimed at ending a seven-week Israeli aggression on Gaza went into effect on Tuesday and joyous Palestinians streamed into the streets of the battered enclave to celebrate.

Minutes before the Egyptian-brokered truce began at 1600 GMT, a rocket fired by Palestinian fighters killed one person in an Israeli kibbutz, or collective farm, near the Gaza border, Israel said.

Palestinian and Egyptian officials said the deal calls for an indefinite halt to hostilities, the immediate opening of Gaza's blockaded crossings with Israel and Egypt and a widening of the territory's fishing zone in the Mediterranean.

A senior official of the Islamist group Hamas, which runs Gaza, voiced willingness for the security forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the unity government he formed in June to control the passage points.

Both Israel and Egypt view Hamas as a security threat and are seeking guarantees that weapons will not enter the territory of 1.8 million people.

Under a second stage of the truce that would begin a month later, Israel and the Palestinians would discuss the construction of a Gaza sea port and Israel's release of Hamas prisoners in the occupied West Bank, the officials said.

After the ceasefire began, crowds and traffic filled the Gaza streets. Car horns blared and recorded chants praising God sounded from mosque loudspeakers.

"Today we declare the victory of the resistance, today we declare the victory of Gaza," Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said.

Israel gave a low-key response to the truce.

A statement issued by a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had accepted the Egyptian proposal for “an open-ended ceasefire” and would attend Cairo talks on Gaza’s future only if there was a “total end to terror attacks” from the enclave.

The conflict has taken a heavy toll in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian health officials say 2,139 people, most of them civilians, including more than 490 children, have been killed in the enclave since July 8, when Israel launched an offensive.

Sixty-four Israeli soldiers and five civilians in Israel have been killed.

Thousands of homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged in the most prolonged Israeli-Palestinian fighting since a 2000-2005 Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.

“We have mixed feelings. We are in pain for the losses but we are also proud we fought this war alone and we were not broken,” said Gaza teacher Ahmed Awf, 55, as he held his two-year-old son in his arms and joined in the street festivities.

Despite Israeli bombardments from sea and air and an offensive that included a ground invasion, Hamas was able to keep up cross-border rocket salvoes that reached Israel’s heartland, in Tel Aviv. Many of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said 540,000 people had been displaced in the territory. Israel has said Hamas bears responsibility for civilian casualties because it operates among non-combatants. Israel claims that the group uses schools and mosques to store weapons and as launch sites for rockets.

In the run-up to the ceasefire, Israel bombed more of Gaza’s tallest structures in attacks that toppled a 13-storey apartment and office tower and destroyed most of a 16-floor residential building.

Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas control and command centres. 

DUBAI — Air strikes by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on Libyan Islamists — as alleged by Washington despite denials from Cairo and the Gulf state — would mark an escalation of a regional struggle over the future of the Arab world.

If true, Arab responsibility for the attacks would also add to a picture of the West's regional allies acting increasingly independently in the absence of decisive US involvement, seeking security goals with which Washington may not agree.

US officials said on Monday that Egypt and the UAE, which has one of the most powerful air forces in the Middle East, had carried out a series of strikes on Islamist fighters in Tripoli.

European allies joined Washington in urging outsiders not to interfere in Libya, which is suffering its worst violence since the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

Tripoli residents said last weekend that unidentified jets had attacked targets in the capital. There were also strikes on Islamist-held positions last Monday.

Egypt denied conducting air raids in the North African country, while UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash suggested on Twitter that the allegations had been promoted by anti-UAE Islamists.

Whoever carried out the raids, they were in tune with wider efforts by Egypt and conservative Sunni Muslim allies to roll back the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood — a regional Islamist movement — and its sponsor, Qatar.

Analysts noted that President Barack Obama, who last year called off air strikes on Syria at the last minute, has himself said US allies in the region should play a greater role in tackling local crises.

“In the light of US inaction in Syria, the message is clear, that you have to take care of your own concerns,” said Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, stressing that he did not know for sure if the UAE was involved or not. If the raids were indeed carried out by Egypt and the UAE, it would open a new chapter in inter-Arab relations, said Theodore Karasik, research director at Dubai think tank INEGMA.

“The feeling is that America hasn’t stood up for its values and policies in the region,” he said, referring to a common Arab view that the US administration has been hesitant in supporting rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“So these states will now take it upon themselves to act. Ironically this is, in broad terms, what Washington has been asking them to do — solve their own problems.”

The alleged use of outside military muscle touched a nerve in the West, acutely aware that its own intervention in Libya in the run-up to the fall of Qadhafi contributed to the country’s descent into chaos.

In an indication of the sensitivity of the issue, the publication of their assertions was followed within hours by a joint statement by the United States and European allies cautioning against foreign interference.

Outside involvement would worsen divisions in Libya and slow progress in its political transition, it said.

And yet the West may have to get used to a more activist stance by participants in a tussle for influence pitting Egypt and most conservative Arab Gulf states against Islamist-friendly Qatar, Sudan and non-Arab Turkey and Iran.

A number of Arab powers have used a variety of tools in the past four years including armed force, aid, finance and diplomacy to shape events in Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Libya to their advantage.

“The important point here is that regional forces are taking their own path to supporting proxies,” said Karasik. “This is the result of the region wanting to police itself without waiting for extra-regional decisions.”

Abdullah said that if the UAE had taken part in the raid, it must have had “very compelling reasons to do so”. If Libya became a failed state and an exporter of extremists then the stability of neighbouring Egypt would be at risk, he added.

The world was busy with many other crises, and so action may have been needed to prevent extremists taking over, he said. 

While policy differences between Washington and its Arab allies are nothing new, the propensity of some to go it alone in pursuing their aims is novel.

Egypt provides a clear example. Saudi Arabia was furious when veteran ruler Hosni Mubarak was toppled in 2011 and the Muslim Brotherhood, long mistrusted by Riyadh, later won power. Qatar helped to fund the elected Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted by the army last year.

Riyadh and the UAE have since provided money to support Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who as a general led the takeover and has since been elected president after suppressing the Brotherhood.

US officials have looked askance at the heavy-handed political and security tactics of Sisi’s authorities, which they believe have helped to polarise Egyptian society.

Sisi’s men now fear that Islamists, if left to flourish in Libya’s disorder, could lay the foundations for the return of the Brotherhood in Egypt one day.

For most Gulf Arabs, the Brotherhood is anathema because its ideology challenges the principle of conservative dynastic rule long followed in the Gulf.

Gulf Arab states take Egypt’s stability seriously, regarding the Arab world’s most populous nation as their chief regional ally in their confrontation with Shiite Muslim Iran.

Riyadh sees the Iranian administration as an expansionist power bent on exporting revolution to the Arab world and interfering in the affairs of neighbouring Gulf states. Tehran denies any such interference.

DUBAI — Iran's deputy foreign minister said he held "positive and constructive" talks with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister on Tuesday where Islamist militancy in Iraq — that both see as a threat — was one of the topics discussed.

Hossein Amir Abdollahian was in Jeddah for the first high-level bilateral talks between the two countries since Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran a year ago, pledging to thaw Tehran's frosty relations with its Arab neighbours.

"Both sides emphasised the need to open a new page of political relations between the two countries," Abdollahian told Reuters by telephone after meeting Prince Saud Al Faisal.

The two men discussed issues of regional security such as the rise of the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Israeli attacks on Gaza, Abdollahian said, adding: "The meeting took place in a very positive and constructive atmosphere."

Official Saudi media did not intially report on Abdollahian's arrival, a sign of the sensitivity of relations between two of the Middle East's big powers which are separated by the Gulf and a religious divide, with Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia often at odds with Shiite Iran.

But state news agency SPA later did report the talks, saying the men "reviewed bilateral relations between the two countries and discussed a number of regional and international issues of common interest".

Saudi Arabia and Iran back opposing sides in wars and political struggles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain, usually along sectarian lines, and vie for influence across the Middle East.

However, both Tehran and Riyadh were aghast at the rapid advances made by Islamic State in June and July and welcomed the departure of Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki this month.

Maliki was a close political ally of Iran but Tehran came to see him as a liability after many Sunni Iraqis, who felt sidelined or persecuted by the Shiite prime minister, sided with Islamic State.

Maliki was seen in Riyadh as being too close to Iran, and King Abdullah believed he had failed to fulfil promises to rein in the power of Shiite militias that targeted Sunnis.

Saudi Arabia remains wary of the incoming Iraqi prime minister, Haider Al Abadi, who is from the same political bloc as Maliki, analysts in the kingdom say, and continues to oppose what it sees as Iranian interference in Arab countries.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif continued his own visit to Iraq on Tuesday, meeting Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani, to whose forces Tehran has supplied weapons in response to Islamic State advances.

DJIBOUTI — Djibouti's president was unhurt when a member of the Republican Guard shot and wounded his doctor and at least one other person at the airport of the Red Sea nation after the presidential party had flown in, officials said on Tuesday.

President Ismail Omar Guelleh, who was returning from a meeting in Ethiopia, had left the airport shortly before the shooting took place on Monday afternoon, they said.

The Republic Guard said in a statement that one of its soldiers had "suddenly opened fire" injuring two people, including a Republican Guard doctor. It gave no motive for the attack but said an investigation had been launched.

There was no immediate suggestion of a political motive for the shooting.

A spokesman for the guard said three people had been injured in the incident. He said the doctor was the president's physician and had accompanied Guelleh on his trip to Addis Ababa.

A former French colony, Djibouti hosts a French military base and the only US military base in Africa. Its port is used by foreign navies policing the Gulf of Aden's shipping lanes, some of the busiest in the world, against pirates from Somalia, which borders the country to the south.

MOGADISHU — "The president has arrived, the president has arrived," chant youths in Mogadishu's Beerta Khaatka market, as armed men in trucks mounted with machine guns escort lorries with horns blaring through the throng.

The joking salutation is not for Somalia's president, but hails a national institution nonetheless: white sacks brimming with leafy sprouts of khat, the narcotic shrub chewed across the Horn of Africa and Yemen in a tradition dating back centuries.

The ubiquitous sight of young men with rifles slung over their shoulders and green stalks of khat dangling from their mouths is emblematic of the Somalia of recent decades, where marauding Islamist rebels and warlords bent on carving out personal fiefdoms have fomented a culture of guns and violence.

Grown on plantations in the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, tonnes of khat, or qat, dubbed "the flower of paradise" by its users, are flown daily into Mogadishu airport, to be distributed from there in convoys of lorries to markets across Somalia.

Britain, whose large ethnic Somali community sustained a lucrative demand for the leaves, banned khat from July as an illegal drug. This prohibition jolted the khat market, creating a supply glut in Somalia and pushing down prices, to the delight of the many connoisseurs of its amphetamine-like high.

"Those who exported to London have now made Mogadishu their khat hub," said Dahir Kassim, an accountant for a wholesale khat trader in Somalia's rubble-strewn capital where women under umbrella stands sell khat bundles wrapped in banana leaves.

The price of the cheap Laari khat popular in the impoverished country has halved to about $10 per kilogramme since Britain outlawed the stimulant. A kilogramme of "Special" or "London" khat has also gone down to about $18 from $30.

Before the UK ban, 27-year-old mason's assistant Mohamed Khalif could only afford to chew once a week. "Now I chew daily and my problems are over," said Khalif, blissfully.

The daily arrival of the khat trucks galvanises markets, sending female traders scrambling for the sacks of stems and leaves, whose potency wanes within a few days of plucking.

Other street vendors take advantage of the hubub to try to sell soft drinks and cigarettes.

Time-old tradition or 

a harmful vice?

"I bought my own houses from khat sales," said 55-year-old wholesale seller Seinab Ali in Mogadishu, distributing bundles of wrapped leaves to local traders.

But khat exporters in Kenya, a former British colony where the cash crop bolsters the local economy, say the UK ban has slashed their profits from sales to Somalia.

"Britain has made our khat business useless," said Nur Elmi, a khat trader in Kenyan capital Nairobi from where shipments to Somalia have almost doubled after Britain's ban.

"They cannot afford to buy it all [in Somalia], so we sell it at throwaway prices," he said.

The British decision to classify khat an illegal class-C drug was surrounded by heated debate, with critics saying it would create a lucrative clandestine market and even alienate immigrant youths, driving them into crime or Islamist extremism.

Home Secretary Theresa May had argued in backing the ban that it would help prevent Britain from becoming a hub for the trade, which was already banned in the United States and several European countries. She also cited evidence that khat had been linked to "low attainment and family breakdowns".

While defenders of khat-chewing hail it as a time-honoured social tradition comparable to drinking coffee, detractors say it shares part of the blame for the violent and destructive chaos suffered by Somalia for the last 20 years.

Somalia's cash-strapped government seldom collects health statistics. The spike in use is a concern but officials are too busy battling Islamist Al Shabaab rebels and rebuilding Somalia's state institutions to dedicate much attention to it, said the Mogadishu mayor's spokesman Ali Mohamud.

"Somali people are wasting money, time and energy on khat," he said. "Khat has only advantaged those who grow it."

A 2006 World Health Organisation report on khat said it can increase blood pressure, insomnia, anorexia, constipation, irritability, migraines and also impair sexual potency in men.

Even many of those who make a living from the khat trade recognise that its consumption can be harmful.

"Khat is good for mothers who sell it but for those who consume it is a disaster. Day and night I pray to God so that my children do not chew khat," said wholesaler Ali.

Many Somali women point to wrecked marriages and abandoned children as testimony to the dangers of excessive use of khat.

"Men who chew are not good," said Maryan Mohamed, who said she had been married 13 times. "They chew alongside their hungry children."

LONDON — Britain's top counter-terrorism police officer said on Tuesday arrests linked to fighting in Syria had risen dramatically this year and that significant progress was being made to trace a British man suspected of murdering American journalist James Foley.

Launching an appeal to Muslim communities to help identify "aspiring terrorists", Mark Rowley, the National Policing Lead for Counter Terrorism, said Britain had been escalating its efforts to address rising terrorism problems relating to Syria.

"There is a lot at stake," Rowley said in a statement. "High priority operations, especially against those involved in attack planning or on the cusp have increased greatly."

A video released by Islamic State (IS) last week showing the beheading of Foley, apparently by a masked knifeman speaking English with a London accent stirred proposals for tough new laws to deal with British Islamist militants travelling to Iraq and Syria to join the jihadists.

"Every reasonable person in the country has been touched by the pitiless murder of James Foley at the hands of Islamic State terrorists, and the murderer's apparent British nationality has focused attention on extremism in the UK as well as the Middle East," he said in a statement.

"Investigators are making significant progress but we will not be giving a running commentary."

On Sunday, the British ambassador to the United States said Britain was close to identifying Foley's killer.

A number of possible identities have been suggested by British media although sources on both sides of the Atlantic have told Reuters that there was little likelihood of the British government naming the suspect imminently.

Foley's murder sparked another round of soul-searching in Britain which has wrestled with how to deal with Islamist militants at home since the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

Since then, four young Britons carried out suicide bombings in London which killed 52 people in July 2005 while the murder last year of an off-duty soldier on a London street by two British Muslim converts has exacerbated concerns.

The government estimates at least 500 Britons have travelled to Syria or Iraq, where IS has seized large swathes of territory, and has repeatedly warned that those who have gone posed a serious risk on their return.

Fivefold rise in arrest rate

Rowley said there had been 69 arrests this year for terrorism offences linked to Syria, from fundraising to travelling abroad for terrorist training, a fivefold rise in the arrest rate compared to last year.

"The growth of dangerous individuals poses challenges for policing, especially when nearly half of Syria travellers of concern were not known as terrorist risks previously," he said, adding that the biggest growth rates in police investigations were in London and central England.

"We are appealing to the public, family members and friends to help identify aspiring terrorists. They may be about to travel abroad, have just returned or be showing signs of becoming radicalised."

Home Secretary Theresa May said on Saturday the government was looking at new laws to try to prevent Britons going abroad to fight, while London Mayor Boris Johnson has called for those who travelled to Syria and Iraq without telling the authorities to be presumed to be terrorists.

However, the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank criticised the "knee-jerk" reaction of combining law and war to combat Islamist issues at home.

"Law and war each have their respective time and place and we have already seen implementations of arbitrary rendition, detention without trial, profiling, losing the right to silence at ports of entry and exit, and occupation of certain countries," it said.

"Britain has had no shortage of these measures during war times, yet our terrorism problem globally seems to have gotten worse."

ERBIL — Iran has supplied weapons and ammunition to Iraqi Kurdish forces, Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani said Tuesday at a joint press conference with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Erbil, capital of Iraq's Kurdish region.

The direct arming of Kurdish forces is a contentious issue, because some Iraqi politicians suspect Kurdish leaders have aspirations to break away from the central government completely. The move could also be seen by some as a prelude to Iran's taking a more direct role in broader Iraqi conflict.

"We asked for weapons and Iran was the first country to provide us with weapons and ammunition," Barzani said.

Militants from the Islamic State have clashed with Kurdish peshmerga fighters in recent weeks and taken control of some areas on the periphery of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Earlier in the day, a car bomb was detonated in a mainly Shiite district of eastern Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 28, police and medical sources said. The bombing in the New Baghdad neighbourhood followed a series of blasts in the Iraqi capital on Monday which killed more than 20 people.

The Islamic State, which controls large swathes of northern and western Iraq, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the New Baghdad neighbourhood on Monday. It said in a statement the attack was carried out as revenge for an attack against a Sunni mosque in Diyala on Friday which killed 68 and wounded dozens.

The UN Human Rights Council will hold an emergency session in Geneva on Monday concerning abuses being committed by Islamic State and other militant groups in Iraq, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

The 47 member states of the forum have moral authority to condemn abuses or set up international investigations into war crimes or crimes against humanity, but they cannot impose binding resolutions

The Iranian foreign minister held talks with Barzani on Tuesday, one day after visiting senior Shiite clerics in southern Iraq. Zarif acknowledged giving military assistance to Iraqi security forces but said the cooperation did not include deploying ground troops in the country.

"We have no military presence in Iraq," Zarif said. "We do have military cooperation with both the central government and the Kurds in different arenas."

Neither Zarif nor Barzani gave any details on whether weapons supplied to Kurdish peshmerga forces had been routed through the central government or given directly to Kurdish forces. Prime Minister-designate Haider Al Abadi said Monday that arms given to the peshmerga had been routed through the central government.

Britain, France, Germany and Italy have also promised to send military assistance to Kurdish security forces to fight the Islamic State.

The United States has carried out a series of air strikes against the Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq in the past two weeks, partly to protect the Kurdish region from being overrun.

Zarif denied that Iran and the United States were discussing Iraq as part of talks between Iran and Western powers about Iran's nuclear programme.

UNITED NATIONS — Humanitarian access in Syria has improved since the UN Security Council last month authorised the delivery of emergency aid across the Syrian border without the government's consent, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a new report.

But he warned that designated terrorist groups continue to prevent aid workers from accessing some of the estimated 10.8 million people in Syria in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

"All parties to the conflict continue to deny access to humanitarian assistance in an unjustifiable manner," Ban said. "Hundreds of thousands of people live under siege."

The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2165 last month, which authorised aid access at four border crossings from Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, even though Syria had warned it deemed such deliveries incursions into its territory.

Ban said it was the first time he was able to report improvements since he began submitting monthly updates on aid access earlier this year.

"Access across borders following the adoption of resolution 2165 has resulted in broader reach to areas in Aleppo, Dar'a [Deraa], Rural Damascus, Idleb [Idlib] and Lattakia [Latakia]," he said in the report, obtained by Reuters on Monday.

He said aid access had improved in Aleppo and rural Damascus, adding that "many of these locations had not received assistance since the onset of the conflict".

The Security Council will discuss Ban's report on Thursday.

Ban said medical supplies, including surgical items, reached several rebel-held areas this month.

Aid delivered across Syria's border included food for over 67,000 people, water and sanitation supplies for around 75,000, and medical supplies for almost 110,000 people. Ban said the Syrian government was notified in advance of each cross-border shipment.

Of the overall 10.8 million people in need — roughly half of Syria's population — there are over 6.4 million people who are internally displaced due to the civil war, currently in its fourth year.

Ban said around 4.7 million people reside in hard-to-reach areas, including at least 241,000 people who remain besieged by either government or opposition forces.

There was bad news about militant groups.

"The prolongation of the conflict in Syria has created fertile ground for radical armed groups, including those affiliated with al Qaeda," Ban said.

"Recent events in Iraq and the latest fighting in Arsal, Lebanon, vividly demonstrate the devastating impact of the Syrian conflict on the neighboring countries and beyond," he said. "Countries in the region should find ways to build bridges that promote calm and reconciliation."

He reiterated his calls for an end to arms deliveries to all parties to the conflict.

"The advance of the ISIL into central Syria and reported violations, including extrajudicial killings of civilians and beheadings of those captured is of grave concern," Ban said.

Islamic State fighters, who have seized control of parts of Syria and Iraq, have blocked aid access to northern Al Hasakah and Aleppo, as well as Kurdish areas, he said.

GENEVA — The head of the United Nations Human Rights Council announced on Monday he had appointed a US judge to join a panel set up to look into alleged war crimes during Israel's military offensive in Gaza.

Israel has already dismissed the panel as a "kangaroo court" that is biased in advance against the Jewish state.

US Judge Mary McGowan Davis will join Canadian academic William Schabas and former UN racism investigator Doudou Diene of Senegal on the Commission of Inquiry created in July at the request of Palestinians backed by Arab and Muslim states.

Schabas is to chair the three-member group, to the annoyance of Israel which has pointed to the Canadian's record as a strong critic of the Jewish state and its current political leadership.

The head of the 47-member Human Rights Council, Gabon's Baudelaire Ndong Ella, personally selected the Canadian from a list which diplomats said had contained several candidates with little or no such "baggage".

Lebanese-born lawyer Amal Alamuddin, better known as the fiancee of US film star George Clooney, was also initially approached to join Schabas' team but declined.

Her replacement, McGowan Davis, who had a 24-year career in the New York City criminal justice system as state supreme court judge and federal prosecutor, was involved in an earlier investigation of Israel and her appointment could also spark controversy.

Diene also has a record of sometimes fiercely criticising Israel for its treatment of Palestinians and its own Arab citizens during the six years he spent as the UN special investigator on racism from 2002-2008.

The new panel is due to make its first report by next March.

It is meant to look into the behaviour of both Israel and of Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza and calls in its founding constitution for the destruction of Israel.

Hamas has welcomed the appointment of Schabas, who lives in Britain and teaches international law at Middlesex University.

Schabas told Reuters this month he was determined to put aside any views about "things that have gone on in the past".

His appointment drew condemnation from pro-Israeli groups in the United States and Europe as well as from Israel. Some officials and diplomats in Geneva who are themselves critical of Israel say privately he was not the best option.

McGowan Davis was a member and later chair of a UN committee of independent experts which followed up on the findings of an earlier fact-finding mission into Israel's three-week incursion into Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

That mission, headed by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, produced a report which bore his name and was rejected by Israel, and strongly criticised by the United States and some other countries as "one-sided".

Goldstone himself later disassociated himself from some of the report's conclusions, saying that later information provided by Israel had convinced him that they were wrong.

As during the 2008-2009 conflict, Israel says it launched its latest offensive on July 8 to stop regular missile attacks from Gaza against civilian targets on its territory by Hamas and allied fighters.

On Monday, Palestinian health officials said 2,122 people had been killed in Gaza in the past seven weeks, most of them civilians and including more than 400 children.

Israel says Hamas deliberately hides its weapons and fighters among ordinary civilians. It says 64 of its soldiers and four civilians have died in the latest Gaza conflict.

DUBAI/RIYADH — Iran's deputy foreign minister will visit Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for the first bilateral talks between the Middle East's most intractable Muslim rivals since Iran's political landscape shifted in 2013, media in both countries reported.

Shiite Muslim Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are enmeshed in a struggle for influence across the Middle East and they support opposing sides in wars and political disputes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen.

But both Riyadh and Tehran welcomed this month's nomination of Haider Al Abadi, a Shiite, as prime minister-designate of Iraq, which is battling militants of the Islamic State who have seized swathes of that country in recent months.

Riyadh had long seen Abadi's predecessor, Nouri Al Maliki, also a Shiite, as being too close to Tehran.

The deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, left Tehran on Monday, Iran's state news agency IRNA reported.

Riyadh officials were not available to comment, but Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al Arabiya said the Iranian minister would arrive on Tuesday for talks.

In another bout of regional diplomacy on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met senior Iraqi Shiite clerics who played a key role in the country's political crisis by urging Maliki to step down.

"The significance of Abdollahian's visit to Saudi Arabia is that it coincides with efforts to form a new government in Iraq. It also coincides with Zarif's tour of Iraq, his second since becoming foreign minister," said Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst based in Tehran.

Key regional players

IRNA said Abdollahian was scheduled to meet Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal to discuss bilateral issues, in the first such visit since the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in 2013.

One of Rouhani's first official comments after being elected was a pledge to improve ties with the Islamic republic's Gulf Arab neighbours, but mutual suspicion has persisted.

"It is very important for Iran and Saudi Arabia to talk because they both play a role in the region," said Abdullah Al Askar, head of the foreign policy committee on Saudi Arabia's appointed Shoura Council, which advises the government on policy.

"But we have to talk to tell them frankly about our reservations about their meddling in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and elsewhere. Iran now is trying to back all these sectarian groups and trying to shake the ground underneath regional countries," he added.

Prince Saud said in May he had invited Zarif to visit the kingdom for talks, but Iran later said the invitation was only to participate in a wider Islamic meeting and that the minister could not attend.