Region

RAMALLAH — Violent protests sparked by the abduction and killing of a Palestinian teenager spread to Arab villages in Israel on Saturday, presenting a new challenge to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel has stayed silent on the investigation into the death of an East Jerusalem youth who Palestinians believe was kidnapped and killed by far-right Jews, but the Palestinian attorney-general was reported as saying he had been burned alive.

“The direct cause of death was burns as a result of fire and its complications,” Mohammed Al A’wewy was quoted as saying by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA late on Friday.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have risen sharply since three Israeli teens were kidnapped on June 12 and later found dead in the occupied West Bank.

This was followed on Wednesday by the kidnapping of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, in his neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. His charred body was found hours later in a forest on the edge of the city.

Saber Al Aloul, the director of the Palestinian forensic institute, attended the autopsy, which was carried out by Israeli doctors. Al A’wewy said Al Aloul had reported soot had been found in Khdeir’s respiratory canal, which meant that “the boy had inhaled this material while he was burnt alive”.

Burns covered 90 per cent of the body and there was a cut to the head. Samples such as fluids and tissue were taken for more lab examinations to complete the legal medical report.

At Khdeir funeral on Friday, furious Palestinians chanted “Intifada! Intifada”, calling for a new uprising against Israel. 

Stones thrown at Israeli police were met by tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets in one of the most highly charged displays of enmity in Jerusalem in years.

At least one Palestinian was hurt in confrontations in the city of Nablus overnight, medical staff said.

Stone and firebomb attacks

The protests spread on Saturday to normally calm Arab Israeli areas, mainly along roads in the centre and north of the country where protesters threw stones and firebombs at passing cars. Dozens were arrested in these clashes, a police spokeswoman said.

A Jewish driver was forced from his vehicle and told to flee before his car was burned at one location while at another, a woman suffered light injuries from rocks thrown at her car.

Palestinian officials trying to calm tensions have said they would prevent any Intifada, or uprising, and seek a solution to the crisis that began when the three Israeli teens were kidnapped.

The discovery of the bodies of the three Jewish seminary students on Monday prompted an outpouring of national grief in Israel.

Many Palestinians, including President Mahmoud Abbas, assert that Khdeir was the victim of far-right Jews incensed at the Israeli deaths.

Netanyahu has called Abu Khdeir’s killing “loathsome” and ordered a swift police investigation.

Israeli authorities said they did not yet know whether Abu Khdeir was indeed the victim of a hate crime.

Tensions also persisted on Saturday along the frontier with the Gaza Strip, where Israeli warplanes bombed three Hamas targets in response to mortar and rocket fire at Israel.

There were no reported casualties in the air raids or from the 14 rockets fired at Israel.

Israel mobilised ground forces on Thursday along the Gaza frontier in a threat to invade if rocket fire from the enclave did not stop. Egypt, a bordering country, has tried to mediate a truce to prevent an escalation of these hostilities.

BAGHDAD — A video posted online Saturday purports to show the leader of the Islamic State extremist group that has overrun much of Syria and Iraq delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq, in what would be a rare — if not the first — public appearance by the shadowy militant.

The video was released on at least two websites known to be used by the group, but it was not possible to independently verify whether the person shown was indeed the group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. 

It bore the logo of Al Furqan, the group’s media arm.

Through brute force and guile, the Islamic State group has seized control of a vast swath of land straddling Syria and Iraq, and has declared the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in those territories. It proclaimed Baghdadi the leader of its state and demanded that all Muslims pledge allegiance to him.

“The mujahedeen have been rewarded victory by God after years of jihad, and they were able to achieve their aim and hurried to announce the caliphate and choose the imam,” he says in the video, referring to the leader.

“It is a burden to accept this responsibility to be in charge of you,” he adds. “I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.”

He is dressed in black robes and a black turban, has dark eyes, thick eyebrows and a full black beard. He speaks eloquent classical Arabic, but with little emotion.

The mosque has several dozen men and boys standing for prayer, and a flag of the black Islamic State group is hoisted in the mosque. One man stands guard, with a gun holster under his arm.

At the beginning of the video, the man purported to be Al Baghdadi slowly climbs the pulpit in the great mosque in Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, which Al Baghdadi’s group captured last month. Then the call to prayer is made as he cleans his teeth with a miswak, a special type of stick that devout Muslims use to clean their teeth and freshen their breath.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official said that after an initial analysis the man in the video is believed to indeed be Al Baghdadi. The official said the arrival of a large convoy in Mosul around midday Friday coincided with the blocking of cellular networks in the area. He says the cellular signal returned after the convoy departed.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media.

A Mosul resident confirmed that mobile networks were down around the time of Friday prayers, and then returned a few hours later. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears for his safety.

Another aspect of the rule Al Baghdadi envisions was made clear in a series of images that emerged online late Saturday showing the destruction of at least 10 ancient shrines and Shiite mosques in territory his group controls.

The 21 photographs posted on a website that frequently carries official statements from the Islamic State extremist group document the destruction in Mosul and the town of Tal Afar. Some of the photos show bulldozers plowing through walls, while others show explosives demolishing the buildings in a cloud of smoke and rubble.

Residents from both Mosul and Tal Afar confirmed the destruction of the sites.

Sunni extremists consider Shiites Muslims heretics, and the veneration of saints apostasy.

The Islamic State group seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June in the opening act of its lightning offensive that sent much of the Iraqi army scattering. Shiite militiamen and volunteers have had to fill the void as the regular army struggles to regroup.

On Saturday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki removed the chief of the army’s ground forces and the head of the federal police from their posts as part of his promised shake-up in the security forces following their near collapse.

Military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim Al Moussawi says Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki signed the papers to retire Lt. Gen. Ali Ghaidan, commander of the army’s ground forces, and Lt. Gen. Mohsen Al Kaabi, the chief of the federal police. Moussawi says both men leave their jobs with their pensions. No replacements have been named.

Last month, Maliki retired three generals who had been deployed in Mosul and ordered legal proceedings against them. He also dismissed a brigadier general and ordered his court martial in absentia. He said he planned to retire off or court martial more senior officers, but gave no details.

Maliki has also vowed to bring the full weight of military law, including the execution of deserters, on anyone who is found out to have fled the battle.

NEW DELHI — Nearly 50 Indian nurses from the southern state of Kerala have been taken against their will from a hospital in the militant-controlled city of Tikrit in Iraq, India’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

At a briefing with reporters, foreign ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin declined to say who had ordered the nurses to leave the hospital or where they were taken.

“They are not going of their own free will,” he said, when asked whether the nurses had been abducted by a militia. “This is a situation where lives are at stake.”

A senior aide to Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who spoke to the nurses on Thursday, told Reuters that militants had forced the nurses to vacate the hospital and board two buses. Most of the nurses are from the south Indian state of Kerala.

Tikrit, the birthplace of former president Saddam Hussein, has been the site of fierce fighting this week as Iraqi troops battle to regain control of the city from the Al Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Islamic State insurgents and other Sunni Muslim militant groups seized towns and cities across Syria and Iraq in a lightning advance last month.

Indian nurses can earn higher wages in the Middle East than at home. Some of the nurses in Iraq resisted returning to India because they had taken out large loans to get overseas work.

Some critics say the Indian government should have sought to evacuate the group of 46 nurses in Tikrit earlier, despite the difficult security situation.

“The Iraqi army is not in control of Tikrit,” Akbaruddin said, adding that the nurses were still in phone contact with Indian officials. “We have been in touch with humanitarian organisations and they had, in this instance, indicated their inability to reach the nurses given the difficulties in road transport.”

Two weeks ago, 40 Indian construction workers were kidnapped in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, and all but one of them are still in captivity. The workers have been press ganged into building defensive fortifications for the insurgents, Indian newspaper The Hindu reported, citing a senior Kurdish security official.

About 10,000 Indians work in Iraq, mostly in areas unaffected by the fighting, but scores of them have returned to India since ISIL began its offensive.

LONDON — Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has hit back at Baghdad over independent oil exports, a letter from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) showed, threatening to counter sue the central government for trying to block its sales.

The strongly worded letter shows growing confidence from the Kurdish capital Erbil in the long-running oil sales dispute, as Baghdad struggles to regain control of swathes of territory lost to a Sunni Islamic militant insurgency.

The letter, addressed to Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Karim Luaibi from KRG Natural Resource Minister Ashti Hawrami, said the Kurds would pursue legal action by the middle of this month if Baghdad does not stop its “interference”.

“[The] KRG will bring civil, and where necessary, criminal proceedings against your ministry and any person, foreign adviser, or any entity conspiring with your ministry in any form,” Hawrami wrote, in the letter dated June 29 and carried on a KRG website. He did not specify a court for the action.

The autonomous Kurdish region has been trying to establish greater financial independence from Baghdad by selling its own oil production directly on international markets. It has largely been spared the violence affecting much of Iraq.

Baghdad has cut the KRG’s budget since January over the dispute, arguing the sales are illegal, and has repeatedly threatened to sue any firm that buys oil from the autonomous region.

But since the KRG took control of the northern oil hub of Kirkuk amid the retreat of the Iraqi military from the Islamic State-led insurgency, the autonomous region has been emboldened.

On Thursday, the president of Iraq’s Kurdish north asked the region’s parliament to prepare the way for a referendum on its long-saught goal of independence.

In the letter, Hawrami said Baghdad has treated the 2005 Iraqi constitution with “contempt”, arguing it was designed to allow the autonomous Kurdish region to export its own oil.

“These actions of your ministry are clearly politically motivated, hostile, illegitimate, and without constitutional basis, and contrary to the fundamental interests of the people of Iraq,” the letter said.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi insurgents are preparing for an assault on Baghdad, with sleeper cells planted inside the capital to rise up at “Zero Hour” and aid fighters pushing in from the outskirts, according to senior Iraqi and US security officials.

Sunni fighters have seized wide swathes of the north and west of the country in a three week lightning advance and say they are bearing down on the capital, a city of 7 million people still scarred by the intense street fighting between its Sunni and Shiite neighbourhoods during US occupation.

The government says it is rounding up members of sleeper cells to help safeguard the capital, and Shiite paramilitary groups say they are helping the authorities. Some Sunni residents say the crackdown is being used to intimidate them.

Iraqis speak of a “Zero Hour” as the moment a previously prepared attack plan would start to unfold.

A high-level Iraqi security official estimated there were 1,500 sleeper cell members hibernating in western Baghdad and a further 1,000 in areas on the outskirts of the capital.

He said their goal was to penetrate the US-made “Green Zone” — a fortified enclave of government buildings on the west bank of the Tigris — as a propaganda victory and then carve out enclaves in west Baghdad and in outlying areas.

“There are so many sleeper cells in Baghdad,” the official said. “They will seize an area and won’t let anyone take it back... In western Baghdad, they are ready and prepared.”

A man who describes himself as a member of one such cell, originally from Anbar province, the mainly Sunni Western area that has been a heartland of the insurgency, said he has been working in Baghdad as a labourer while secretly coordinating intelligence for his group of Sunni fighters.

The attack on the capital will come soon, said the man, who asked to be called Abu Ahmed.

“We are ready. It can come any minute,” he told Reuters during a meeting in a public place, glancing nervously around to see if anyone was watching.

“We will have some surprises,” he said. He pulled his baseball cap down tight on his face and stopped speaking anytime a stranger approached.

A portly man in his mid-30s wearing a striped sports shirt, the man said he fought as part of an insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades during the US occupation and was jailed by the Iraqi government from 2007-2009.

He gave up fighting in 2010, tired from war and relatively optimistic about the future. But last year, he took up arms again out of anger at a crackdown against Sunni protesters by the Shiite-led government, joining the military council, a loose federation of Sunni armed groups and tribal fighters that has since emerged as a full-fledged insurgent umbrella group.

While it was not possible to verify all details of his story, Reuters reporters are confident of his identity.

Like many Sunni fighters, Abu Ahmed is not a member of the Al Qaeda offshoot once known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and is ambivalent about the group which launched the latest uprising by seizing the main northern city Mosul on June 10 and shortened its name this week to the Islamic State.

Many Sunni armed groups turned against Al Qaeda during the US occupation but are now rallying to ISIL’s rebellion against the Shiite led government, though some say they deplore ISIL’s tactics of killing civilians and branding Shiites heretics.

Abu Ahmed said his own group, which includes former officers in Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army, supports some aims of ISIL. “There are some good members of ISIL and some bad,” he said. Of the good ones: “We have the same cause.”

Security plans

The government says it can protect the capital and has spies who are tracking sleeper agents like Abu Ahmed to round them up.

“We have ample security plans. The sleeper cells are not only in Baghdad but in all other provinces and they are waiting for any chance to carry out attacks,” said Lieutenant-General Qassim Atta, the prime minister’s military spokesman.

“We keep those cells under careful and daily scrutiny, and follow up. We have arrested some of them. We have dispatched intelligence members to follow up those cells closely and we have special plans to counter their activities.”

An attempt to take Baghdad, a majority Shiite city with heavily fortified areas, would be a huge task for a rebellion that has so far concentrated on controlling Sunni areas. Many Baghdadis, Sunnis as well as Shiites, say they would fight an insurgency led by militants who want to establish a caliphate.

The Iraqi capital was the principle battlefield in Iraq’s worst sectarian bloodletting from 2006-2007, with tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, killed in fighting between Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias and US troops.

Then, millions of people fled the capital and millions more fled homes within it, turning previously mixed neighbourhoods into fortresses dominated by one sect or the other.

Although it has been at least six years since warring Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia last held open sway over whole sections of Baghdad, the capital has remained vulnerable to infiltration by ISIL suicide bombers, who strike Shiite and government targets almost daily.

A senior US intelligence official said Washington had evidence that ISIL was in the process of configuring its forces for a Baghdad assault using a plan that would include coordinated ISIL suicide strikes.

However, other US officials believe ISIL could overextend itself were it to try to take all of Baghdad. They say the more likely scenario would be for fighters to seize a Sunni district and cause disruption with bomb attacks.

ISIL fighters insist that their plan is to take the capital and topple Baghdad’s political elite.

“We will receive orders about Zero Hour,” said Abu Sa’da, an ISIL fighter reached by telephone in Mosul. He said the group had cells in Baghdad and communicated with them by e-mail despite the government’s sporadic blocking of Internet in an effort to disrupt the militants.

Cat and mouse 

For now, it is a cat and mouse game in the city. Abu Ahmed said the insurgency had agents in the Iraqi security forces, government ministries and inside the Green Zone. Men like him try to dodge an intensified campaign by the security forces and Shiite militias to round up conspirators.

There are “more detentions right now especially of ex-military officers and those who had been in American jails,” he said. “Their houses are raided by special police and militias, then we never hear about them again. We check the jails, they are not there.”

So far, they’ve managed to free 12 of them, at least one with the help of a 20,000 US dollar bribe. He blames harsh treatment by the Iraqi government for forcing them to war, opening his shirt to reveal two dark scars on his chest he says came from interrogations in custody. There was no way to verify his allegations of abuse by the security forces.

The prospect of an assault on Baghdad has led Shiite paramilitaries, mainly underground since 2008, to mobilise this year to help the authorities fight ISIL. Asaib Ahl Al Haq, a Shiite group Washington believes is funded and armed by Iran, says it has helped round up insurgent agents in Baghdad.

The movement says it is taking orders from the government and responding to a fatwa by Shiite clergy three weeks ago calling on citizens to help the armed forces.

The insurgents’ “goal is to control Baghdad and also to forestall the political process in Baghdad. They will try to execute this plot with their sleeper cells,” said Asaib Ahl Al Haq spokesman Ahmed Al Kinani. “We arrest them and hand them over to security forces.”

Many Sunnis in Baghdad say such activity has brought back memories of the last decade’s civil war, when Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents prowled the streets, capturing and killing the innocent under the excuse of rooting out terrorist foes. Now people are disappearing again.

A Sunni woman who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared retribution from Asaib Ahl Al Haq, said her brother was first held by police for 13 days in April. Eight hours after he was released, masked Asaib fighters stormed into their house and took him.

“Their faces were covered. They had no number plates on their cars,” she said. That was the last time she saw him.

VIENNA — Iran nuclear talks entered Thursday the decisive, dangerous endgame with a final round of hardball negotiations potentially going all the way to a July 20 finish line.

The deal being sought by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany would finally ease fears of Tehran getting nuclear weapons and silence talk of war, in exchange for ending punishing sanctions on the Islamic republic.

With Sunni Islamic insurgents overrunning large parts of Iraq and Syria in chaos after years of civil war, this could help Tehran and the West normalise relations at an explosive time in the Middle East.

“In this troubled world, the chance does not often arise to reach an agreement peacefully that will meet the essential and publicly expressed needs of all sides, make the world safer, ease regional tensions and enable greater prosperity,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said this week.

In a Washington Post tribune, he warned Iran not to “squander a historic opportunity to end Iran’s economic and diplomatic isolation and improve the lives of their people”.

The P5+1 powers have proposed a “series of reasonable, verifiable and easily achievable measures that would ensure Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon and that its programme is limited to peaceful purpose,” he said.

“What will Iran choose? Despite many months of discussion, we don’t know yet.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in a video message, called the talks a “unique opportunity to make history”, saying success would allow both sides to address “common challenges” such as Iraq.

Major differences 

But with major differences apparent after five rounds of talks seeking to secure a deal by July 20 — when an interim deal from November expires — Zarif said in French daily Le Monde that some among the P5+1 were suffering from “illusions”. 

The United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany want Iran to reduce drastically in scope its nuclear activities in order to render any Iranian drive to assemble a weapon all but impossible.

This would include in particular Iran slashing its capacities to enrich uranium, a process that produces nuclear fuel but also, at high purities, the core of a nuclear weapon.

In itself, that would represent a concession to Iran, which is defying six UN Security Council resolutions ordering it cease all enrichment.

But Iran insists it has made too many advances in uranium enrichment to turn the clock back. It rejects any need to cut its number of centrifuges and says it even needs to expand their number to fuel a fleet of future nuclear power plants — facilities that it would be decades away from having.

Demands that Iran’s programme be “radically curbed” rest on a “gross misrepresentation of the steps, time and dangers of a dash for the bomb”, Zarif said.

He said Iran “will not abandon or make a mockery of our technological advances or our scientists”.

Iranian negotiator Majid Takhte Ravanchi said Iran “will not accept definitive restrictions” on its nuclear programme.

“If [the other side] have a maximalist position... there will be no deal,” he said.

Extra time?  

In theory, the July 20 deadline could be extended by up to another six months, and many analysts believe this is already being discussed.

But US President Barack Obama, facing mid-term elections in November and Republican accusations of weakness, is wary of doing anything that could be construed as giving Iran more time to get closer to having the bomb.

This is the long-standing accusation of Israel, the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear-armed state which — together with Washington — has not ruled out military action on the Islamic republic.

But Kelsey Davenport from the Arms Control Association believes that Washington should not shy away from pushing back the deadline if Iran is “negotiating in good faith”.

“The alternative to no deal is far worse for the international community,” she told AFP.

CAIRO — Five men died in Cairo in separate incidents involving a bomb blast and protester clashes with security forces on Thursday, the first anniversary of the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, security sources said.

Thousands of Egyptians opposed to the army’s ouster of Morsi last year joined rare protests in cities and towns around the country, witnesses said. Previous protests had much lower turnout after a new law required official approval.

Security was tight in Cairo as armoured personnel carriers blocked off the city’s central Tahrir Square to head off any possible protests there.

Since Morsi’s ouster, his Muslim Brotherhood group was labelled a terrorist organisation and thousands of Islamists have been jailed on accusations of terrorism and violence while militant Islamists have stepped up attacks on security forces.

“On July 3, Egyptians will revolt, marking the beginning of the end of the coup, marching from all towns and cities across Egypt to liberty squares in all provinces,” an alliance of Morsi’s supporters said in a statement late on Wednesday.

Three of Thursday’s victims died in clashes that broke out in Cairo between protesters and security forces, security sources said. Unrest was reported both from the upscale district of Mohandiseen and poor areas such as Haram and Materiya

Earlier in the day, two men were killed in a bomb blast in a flat in Kerdasa, a western district of the capital where around 10 policemen were killed in an Islamist mob attack last summer. Security sources said they believed one of the victims was involved in that police killing.

Series of bombs 

Another explosive device detonated on Thursday in a car in the northeastern district of Abbassiya and three homemade bombs went off near police cars in the central district of Imbaba without causing injuries, the sources added.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the blasts. Cairo has been hit by a spate of small explosions in recent days and two police officers were killed on Monday trying to defuse bombs planted near the presidential palace.

Last week, a series of makeshift bombs exploded at Cairo metro stations, the first in the capital since Sisi was sworn in as president.

Following Morsi’s overthrow last July, security services launched a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood politicians, activists and street protesters, jailing thousands and killing hundreds in clashes and raids.

Since then, some radical Islamist groups have repeatedly targeted police and soldiers in the capital and elsewhere, mostly by planting makeshift bombs.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt has declared a terrorist organisation, denies any link to the violence.

The authorities’ security dragnet has expanded over the past year to include secular and liberal activists, including many who played leading roles in a 2011 popular revolt that ousted veteran leader Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.

A law passed after Morsi’s fall has sharply restricted the right to protest. Last month, around 23 activists were arrested over a rally in Cairo against the new law.

Rights concerns 

Western governments and rights groups have voiced concern for freedom of expression in Egypt and the security clamp-down has dimmed hopes for democratic evolution in Egypt that had soared after the anti-Mubarak uprising three years ago.

Amnesty International condemned Egypt’s human rights record in a statement on Thursday, saying torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions had increased since Morsi’s political demise.

“Egypt’s notorious state security forces — currently known as National Security — are back and operating at full capacity, employing the same methods of torture and other ill-treatment used during the darkest hours of the Mubarak era,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director of Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa programme.

The government of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who led the army ouster of Morsi, says it is committed to a democratic transition and the rule of law following the 2011 uprising.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel beefed up its forces along its frontier with the Gaza Strip and launched air strikes against Hamas targets there on Thursday in response to persistent Palestinian cross-border rocket attacks.

Israel also faced a second day of violent Palestinian protests in Jerusalem after the discovery of the body of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy on Wednesday in a forest near the city.

Israeli forces are investigating the possibility that he was the victim of a revenge killing over the deaths of three Jewish teenagers, whose abduction on June 12 Israel has blamed on Islamist Hamas fighters in the occupied West Bank.

Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said troops were taking up “defence positions” in Israeli communities that have been struck by the rockets from Gaza. He did not comment on the scale of the deployment.

It is the first time since the border began to heat up in mid-June — in tandem with an Israeli military sweep and search for the three abducted Israeli youths in the West Bank — that Israel has announced troop movements near the Gaza Strip.

“We are moving and we have moved forces,” Lerner said in a conference call with foreign journalists. “Everything we are doing is to de-escalate the situation but on the other hand to be prepared if they don’t de-escalate.”

Israel has “no interest in deepening the conflict with Gaza — the absolute opposite is true”, he added.

Abu Ubaida, spokesman for Hamas’ armed wing, Ezzeldine Al Qassam Brigades, accused Israel of breaching a ceasefire brokered after a 2012 eight-day cross-border war, and said the group would respond according to developments on the ground.

“Our people know well how to exact a heavy price from the enemy,” Ubaida said at a news conference in Gaza.

Funeral 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security Cabinet for a fourth time since Monday, an official said, as tension remained high in Jerusalem in anticipation of the funeral of the Palestinian youth, Mohammed Abu Khdeir.

No time has been set for the burial, an event that will stir strong emotions among Palestinians and could trigger further confrontation.

Police clashed with a few dozen stone-throwing Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Arab neighbourhood Shuafat, but the violence was on a much smaller scale than on Wednesday.

The military said Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had fired 20 projectiles into Israel on Thursday and that rockets struck two homes in the southern town of Sderot, causing no casualties.

Israel launched air strikes against at least three Hamas training facilities in Gaza, residents said, adding that 15 people had been injured.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay condemned both Israelis and Palestinians on Thursday for the latest flare-up of violence across the Gaza border and also Abu Khdeir’s killing.

“From a human rights point of view, I utterly condemn these rocket attacks and more especially I condemn Israel’s excessive acts of retaliation,” Pillay told journalists in Vienna.

The Palestinian youth Abu Khdeir was last seen alive being bundled into a van on Wednesday near his home in the Arab neighbourhood of Shuafat in Jerusalem, a day after the burials of the Jewish teenagers, who were abducted on June 12.

Abu Khdeir’s family said police, who have stepped up patrols in the city, told them the body would be released in the predawn hours of Friday.

A security spokeswoman gave no details of the investigation, other than to say a forensic examination was still under way. She declined to say when the body would be handed over.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who accused Jewish settlers of killing the teenager, spoke by telephone with the youth’s father on Thursday.

“Mohammed is one of the martyrs of this great people,” Abbas said, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

Netanyahu has called the killing a “loathsome murder” and has urged all sides not to take the law into their own hands.

The killing of Abu Khdeir also drew international condemnation and the United States urged Abbas’ Palestinian Authority to “take all necessary steps to prevent an atmosphere of revenge and retribution”.

BAGHDAD — The leader of Iraq’s Kurdish north called on lawmakers in the self-rule region’s parliament to take the necessary steps towards holding a referendum on independence, a move that would likely spell the end of a unified Iraq.

Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish territory has long been a beacon of stability and prosperity, while much of the rest of the country has been mired in violence and political turmoil. But the Sunni insurgent blitz that has engulfed Iraq in recent weeks has provided an opening to Iraq’s Kurds to seize long-disputed territory and a better chance than ever of achieving the goal of their own country.

Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told the region’s legislature in a speech Thursday to set up an electoral commission to “hurry up” and prepare for “a referendum on self-determination”.

“We will be in a better position and we will have better [political]weapons in our hands. But how we will do this?” he said. “What kind of steps there will be? For this, you have to study this issue and take steps in this direction. It is time to decide about our self-determination and not to wait for other people to decide about us.”

Barzani spoke behind closed doors. The Associated Press obtained a video and audio of the address.

The Kurdish region’s militia, known as peshmerga, has seized territory in recent weeks, including the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding oil-rich area, amid the chaos of the Sunni militant offensive, led by the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The jihadi group’s growing strength has caused jitters across the region, particularly in neighbouring Jordan, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

A US defence official said Thursday that Saudi troops are massing along its border with Iraq in response to the extremist group’s advance towards the kingdom’s frontier. The official said countries in the region are nervous about their security and are moving to protect their borders.

The official was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

In northern Iraq, the militants released 32 Turkish truck drivers who were captured when the extremists overran the city of Mosul, Turkey’s foreign minister said.

Speaking to reporters in Ankara, Ahmet Davutoglu said the truckers were heading towards Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, and would be flown later to Turkey.

The drivers were well, although one may need special treatment, he added, without elaborating or giving any details about their release.

Militants seized the truckers June 9 in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Three days later, they took another 49 people from the Turkish consulate in the city.

Davutoglu said efforts were underway to secure the release of the Turks still in captivity.

“The critical process continues,” he said. “Our prayers and our efforts will go on for the rest of them and, God willing, we will share such good news about them too as soon as possible.”

The militants’ takeover of Mosul was the opening act of a bold offensive that has brought much of northern and western Iraq under their control. The assault has eased in recent days since encountering stiffer resistance in Shiite majority areas.

The rapid pace of the advance took the Iraqi government and international community by surprise, as the country’s military melted away in the face of the onslaught.

It also left 46 Indian nurses stranded at a hospital in the militant-held northern city of Tikrit. The nurses are safe but are being forced to move to a new area controlled by the militants, according to Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin.

He also said 40 Indian construction workers abducted two weeks ago near Mosul were still being held, but were unharmed.

Across the border in Syria, meanwhile, the Al Qaeda splinter group seized several towns and villages as well as the country’s largest oil field on Thursday as rival factions gave up the fight, Syrian activists said.

The new developments effectively expand and consolidate areas held by the group — which has shorted its name to the Islamic State — in territory straddling the border between the two conflict-ridden countries.

BEIRUT — Lebanon faces the threat of political and economic collapse as the number of refugees pouring in from Syria is set to exceed a third of the population, Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas said on Thursday.

Derbas said the total was expected to hit 1.5 million by the end of the year, an excessive burden for a country of just 4 million people.

He said the influx of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war will have cost Lebanon’s already fragile economy around $7.5 billion between 2012 and 2014. Border communities hosting Syrian refugees were under particular pressure because of the increase in people willing to work for low wages.

“Unemployment doubled, especially among unspecialised or unskilled labour in those mostly poor areas,” he said, warning that the refugee crisis “threatens to take us to an economic, political and even security collapse”.

The turmoil next door has not only hurt Lebanon’s economy, but has aggravated sectarian tensions and fuelled violence. It currently hosts around 1.1 million registered Syrian refugees.

“We know that we are working towards having more than 1.5 million registered refugees by the end of 2014, which amounts to more than a third of the local population,” Derbas told a meeting of Lebanese ministers and international aid groups.

‘Beyond limits’

According to the United Nations, Lebanon has taken in 38 per cent of all Syrian refugees in the region, more than any other country.

“We all have our limits and we have gone beyond those limits now,” Derbas said.

More than half of the Syrians in Lebanon are children, and the vast majority are not in school. Syrian women and children are often seen begging on the streets in parts of the capital Beirut, and while some refugees have rented apartments, others are living in ad hoc shelters in car parks, garages and abandoned buildings.

The refugees have put increasing pressure on infrastructure in a country that suffers from frequent power cuts and is unable to supply all of its population with clean water.

The United Nations estimates that Lebanon will need $1.6 billion in funding to cope with the humanitarian situation this year, but so far only 23 per cent has been raised.

At the current level of funding, aid agencies will not be able to meet a target of getting 172,000 refugee children into Lebanese schools next year, said Ninette Kelley from the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR.

“We will be unable to launch a polio vaccination campaign for all children in Lebanon under five... 800,000 refugees will go without winter support,” she told the mid-year review meeting.

Syrian refugees are still registering at the rate of 100,000 per month in neighbouring countries, although the outflow has slowed somewhat in recent months, the UNHCR said on Thursday.

The new estimate is for 3.6 million Syrian refugees to be in the region by the end of 2014, against 2.9 million registered currently, it said. Apart from Lebanon, Syrians have fled across borders into Turkey, Jordan and Iraq.