Region

BEIRUT — Lebanon said on Tuesday there is “no decision” to block Palestinians and other refugees from Syria entering the country, after the UN and a rights group criticised the deportation of 41 people.

In a meeting chaired by Interior Minister Nohad Al Mashnuq, the country’s security agencies agreed “there is absolutely no decision to bar them from entry, and the border is open to them”, reported the official National News Agency.

The report came after the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said it was “concerned about the increased restrictions on Palestine refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria from entering Lebanon”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) had also reported Palestinians being “arbitrarily denied entry” at a border crossing from Syria, and said around 40 people had been deported.

The New York-based rights group said deportations into an active war zone violated international law.

A Lebanese security agency source told AFP on Tuesday that 41 people, including many Palestinians, were returned to Syria after they were caught trying to fly out from Beirut airport using fake visas.

The NNA said: “The decision to deport them was because they committed a criminal offence, because they had forged documents in their possession.”

More than a million people have fled Syria’s brutal war, including around 52,000 Palestinians.

Lebanon has not signed the international refugee convention, but has generally kept its borders open to people fleeing the Syrian conflict.

With more than a million refugees from Syria, including 52,000 Palestinians, Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees from the conflict and now has the highest refugee population per capita in the world.

‘No safe place’

The international community has praised Lebanon, which has a population of just four million, for absorbing so many of those fleeing Syria.

Despite its recent criticisms, HRW urged foreign governments to better assist Beirut in hosting refugees.

“Concerned governments should generously assist neighbouring countries, including Lebanon, so that they can meet the needs of refugees and asylum seekers from Syria,” HRW’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director Joe Stork said.

Once numbering 500,000 in Syria, Palestinians have been targeted by both sides in the war, making them one of the country’s most vulnerable groups.

“All civilians in Syria are targets, but the Palestinians are especially vulnerable,” Wissam Sabaaneh of the Palestinian Jafra Foundation told AFP.

Syria’s biggest Palestinian area, Yarmouk in southern Damascus, has been under total blockade by the Syrian army since last year and more than 100 people have died there as a result of food and medical shortages, according to a Syrian monitoring group.

Turkey and Jordan have set up camps for Syrian refugees, but have blocked entry to Palestinians, said Sabaaneh.

“Lebanon is the only place they can go to,” he said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel insists Iran be denied uranium enrichment capabilities under a potentially imminent nuclear deal, a demand that risks opening a new Israeli-United States rift, officials said on Wednesday.

The dispute, a major topic for a visit to Jerusalem by US National Security Adviser Susan Rice on Wednesday and Thursday, appeared part of Israeli efforts to weigh in on world powers’ difficult talks with Tehran before a July 20 date for a deal.

Though not at the table, Israel matters in Western capitals given its fear of a nuclear-armed Iran and threats to attack its arch-foe preemptively if it deem diplomacy a dead end.

A November interim accord easing sanctions on Iran made clear Washington and five other world powers would let it enrich uranium on a reduced scale under a final agreement distancing it from the means to make a bomb. But Israel wants the Iranians to be stripped of all disputed nuclear projects.

Highly enriched uranium can fuel nuclear warheads. Iran says it seeks peaceful atomic energy and medical isotopes only.

“Are we going to agree on enrichment? No,” an Israeli government adviser briefed on Rice’s visit told Reuters.

“We would be happy to see July 20 pass without a deal,” the adviser said, adding that there was worry in Israel that Obama, facing possible gains by Republican rivals in the mid-term US elections of November, might be tempted to accommodate Iran now.

This view seems unlikely to go down well with Obama, a second-term Democrat who has sparred in the past with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over strategies for Iran and peace making with the Palestinians.

‘Intensive consultations’

The adviser described Israel’s hard line as sincere but declarative, rather than a prelude to a new Middle East war, and a signal to supporters in the US Congress to keep up pressure on US President Barack Obama not to compromise with Iran.

Rice tweeted that she was “looking forward to robust and intensive consultations” in Israel and that the allies’ security cooperation “has never been stronger”. On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said her visit to Israel would not produce any new developments regarding Iran. 

Russia, which is among the six world powers negotiating with Iran, said parts of the final agreement could be agreed at a scheduled meeting in Vienna next week.

Some Western diplomats and experts privately acknowledge forcing Iran to halt all uranium enrichment activities, as stipulated in UN Security Council resolutions, is unrealistic given the scale of the programme and resistance from Tehran.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a US official said Rice came to Israel “representing the six powers”, adding: “The question of enrichment, how many [uranium purification] centrifuges Iran should keep, is the big one.”

The US official voiced confidence that a deal with Iran, if achieved, would prevent its heavy water facility at Arak from producing significant amounts of plutonium — another fissile material that could be used for nuclear warheads.

While that would be welcomed by the Israelis, their main focus has long been Iran’s buildup of uranium stocks which might allow it to refine enough fuel for a bomb in short order.

Israel, widely assumed to have the region’s only atomic arsenal, was angered last month when US Secretary of State John Kerry suggested cautious openness to a nuclear deal that would keep Iran 6 to 12 months from the weapons threshold.

A former Israeli security official said Tehran would be five years away from the threshold if the demand for a full Iranian nuclear rollback were met. But the Israeli adviser said the government had not presented any such formulation.

“I’ve not seen or heard anything about what our ‘acceptable’ threshold would be,” the adviser said. “But I do know that less than a year would be unacceptable.”

GAZA — Two Palestinians were executed in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as Israeli spies, the enclave’s Islamist Hamas government said, adding they had helped Israel’s armed forces carry out lethal operations.

The condemned men, one of whom was hanged and the other shot by firing squad, “provided the Occupation [Israel] with information that led to the martyrdowm of citizens”, the interior ministry said in a statement.

Since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, at least 19 prisoners have been executed, 10 of them as alleged spies.

Hamas refuses to recognise Israel and its charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

Under local law, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is meant to have the final say on whether executions should be carried out. Hamas has refused any such consultations, though it entered a unity deal with Abbas last month designed to end a seven-year rift.

Human rights groups have repeatedly condemned the use of the death penalty in Gaza, but Hamas rejects such criticism.

The interior ministry statement said the men executed on Wednesday had been convicted of treason for providing Israel with information used to kill Palestinians and bomb Gaza targets. Both had exhausted legal options and had access to attorneys, the statement said.

CAIRO — Egypt’s former army chief and leading presidential candidate Abdel Fattah Al Sisi suggested on Tuesday he would not receive an Israeli prime minister absent concessions to Palestinians in peace talks.

The retired field marshal, who toppled elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July, is expected to sweep the May 26-27 election. His only rival is leftist politician Hamdeen Sabbahi.

“Let them just make us happy by giving something for the Palestinians,” he said in a television interview, when asked if he would receive an Israeli prime minister or visit the neighbouring country if elected.

Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979, but ties remained formally cold over Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.

Sisi suggested Israel should agree first to a Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed last month, with both sides blaming each other for the failure.

The Egyptian military is engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign against Islamist fighters in the Sinai Peninsula near Israel’s border who have killed hundreds of security personnel, and also attacked Israel.

Israel has also voiced support for a crackdown by Egypt on smuggling tunnels linking Sinai with the Palestinian Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Islamist Hamas movement.

Hamas has been banned in Egypt and its fighters are accused of involvement in attacks and prison breaks in the country during the 2011 uprising against veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Scores of its alleged fighters are standing trial, in absentia, with the now detained Morsi on related charges.

Sisi said the military’s campaign had destroyed most of the smuggling tunnels to Gaza and dried up Hamas’ profits from the contraband.

But he refused to say whether Hamas “opposed” Egypt.

“I want to tell Egyptians: don’t let the situation and feelings against Hamas affect your historic position on the Palestinian cause,” he said.

Egypt controls the only border crossing with Gaza that bypasses Israel, opening intermittently for “humanitarian” cases.

Israel blockaded the strip in 2006, after Hamas fighters kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

LAVI/LUBYA, Israel — Some 10,000 Arab Israelis rallied in northern Israel on Tuesday to demand the right of return for refugees expelled after the creation of Israel in 1948.

The demonstration took place in the Israeli village of Lavi, which was built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lubya.

Lubya was home to 2,726 Palestinians until 1948, when Jewish forces occupied the village during the Arab-Israeli conflict that led to the creation of the Jewish state.

Demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and read out the names of 530 Palestinian villages that were emptied 66 years ago, before observing a minute’s silence in their memory.

“A demonstration organised by Israeli Arab associations gathered about 10,000 people and two youths were arrested for violence against the police,” Israeli security spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Groups demanding the right of return for Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948 organised the event under the slogan: “Your ‘independence’ day is our ‘Nakbeh’,” Arabic for catastrophe.

“There will be no peace, no stability and no reconciliation without the refugees’ right of return,” Arab Israeli lawmaker Mohammad Barakei told AFP.

More than 760,000 Palestinians — estimated today to number 4.8 million with their descendants — fled or were driven from their homes in 1948.

Palestinians mark Nakbeh day on May 15, but Arab Israelis hold demonstrations on Israeli independence day, which fell on Tuesday this year.

Around 160,000 Palestinians stayed behind and are now known as Arab Israelis. They number about 1.3 million and make up some 20 per cent of Israel’s population.

Most of Lubya’s original inhabitants settled in the Yarmouk refugee camp in the suburbs of Damascus.

In Israeli-annexed Arab East Jerusalem, Israeli forces dispersed a demonstration by Jewish extremists, who marched through the streets of the Old City chanting anti-Arab slogans, the security spokeswoman said.

Israeli arrested two of the demonstrators who tried to force their way past a checkpoint, she added.

DUBAI — A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced the editor of an Internet forum he founded to discuss the role of religion in the conservative Islamic kingdom to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes, Saudi media reported on Wednesday.

Raif Badawi, who started the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, was originally sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in July last year, but an appeals court overturned the sentence and ordered a retrial.

Apart from imposing a stiffer sentence on Badawi in his retrial, the judge at the criminal court in the Red Sea City of Jeddah also fined him 1 million riyals ($266,600). Badawi’s website has been closed since his first trial.

His lawyers said Wednesday’s sentence was too harsh, although the prosecutor had demanded a harsher penalty, news website Sabq reported. The ruling is subject to appeal.

The prosecution had demanded that Badawi be tried for apostasy, a charge which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The judge in last year’s trial had dismissed the apostasy charges.

Badawi was arrested in June 2012 and charged with cyber crime and disobeying his father — a crime in Saudi Arabia.

His website included articles that were critical of senior religious figures such as Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, according to Human Rights Watch.

In a separate ruling on Tuesday, the court also convicted the administrator of a website on charges of supporting Internet forums hostile to the state and which promoted demonstrations, Sabq reported on Wednesday. It said he was sentenced to six years in jail and a 50,000 riyal fine.

The news website said another Saudi was sentenced to five years in jail for publishing a column by a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric on his website.

The world’s top oil exporter follows the strict Wahhabi School of Sunni Islam and applies Islamic law, Sharia. Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.

Rattled by the uprisings that destabilised the Middle East in recent years, Riyadh intensified a crackdown on domestic dissent with arrests and prosecutions.

In April, prominent Saudi rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abu Al Khair was detained incommunicado after appearing in court in Riyadh on sedition charges, according to his wife.

Also in April, a Saudi court sentenced an unidentified activist to six years in jail on charges including taking part in illegal demonstrations and organising women’s protests.

Another was sentenced to three years in jail for spreading lies against King Abdullah and inciting the public against him.

SANAA — Yemen, involved in a military offensive against Al Qaeda in the south of the country, said security forces in the capital shot dead a militant suspected of killing a French security agent two days before, state news agency Saba reported on Wednesday.

Special forces shot Wael Abdallah Masoud Al Waeli and another man after they resisted arrest Sanaa early on Wednesday, Saba quoted the interior ministry as saying. A third member of the group was captured alive.

Yemeni forces are conducting an offensive against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its local offshoot, Ansar Al Sharia Al Qaeda and captured the militants’ main stronghold in the south on Tuesday.

Yemeni security sources accuse Al Qaeda of conducting assassinations, including the killing of the Frenchman who was working as a security agent for the EU mission in the capital Sanaa on Monday, as a way of deflecting pressure on their fighters in the battlefront.

“He [Waeli] was the supervisor behind the killing of the French citizen the day before yesterday,” Yemen’s supreme security committee said, according to Saba.

Waeli had organised other attacks on Westerners, it said, including the kidnapping of a Dutch couple last year who were released in December after six months in captivity, and was also involved in an attack on the central prison in Sanaa in February that freed at least 19 Al Qaeda-linked inmates.

The level of retaliatory attacks against security forces has risen sharply since the start of the army offensive last week.

Gunmen shot dead a police officer in the southern province of Lahj, Saba quoted a local official as saying on Wednesday. Ali Haidar Mater, a local official in Lahj, also survived an assassination attempt by gunmen.

The army captured the southern town of Al Mahfad in Abyan province, one of two Al Qaeda strongholds, on Tuesday and on Wednesday, the defence ministry a number of “terrorists” in Shabwa — the other province where fighting is taking place — had been killed in clashes.

A military source said a militant commander known as Abu Dajana had been killed in the Shabwa fighting. Saba said security forces had also found the body of a militant known as Abu Ayyoub Al Jaza’iri (the Algerian) in Abyan.

Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has said many AQAP fighters in Yemen are foreigners. Yemen has announced the death of an Uzbek militant and a Chechen.

ADDIS ABABA — South Sudan’s government said on Wednesday it had ordered a one-month suspension of attacks on rebel forces as international pressure mounts for an end to an ethnic conflict that has raised fears of genocide.

South Sudanese Information Minister Michael Makuei Lueth said the government’s commitment to honour a “month of tranquillity”, proposed on Monday at peace talks in Ethiopia, meant the army could still fight back if attacked.

There was no immediate word from the rebels.

“We have already given our forces an order,” Lueth told a news conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where months of peace talks have made little progress.

A ceasefire deal struck in January swiftly fell apart, with each side blaming the other for fighting that has exacerbated deep-rooted tensions between President Salva Kiir’s Dinka people and the Nuer tribe of his sacked deputy president, Riek Machar. The conflict has largely followed ethnic faultlines.

Kiir and Machar are due to hold face-to-face talks in Addis Ababa on Friday.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Juba last week that Kiir had committed himself to talks on a transitional government, and has threatened Machar with sanctions if he does not meet Kiir.

South Sudanese Foreign Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin told Reuters on Wednesday that the plan envisaged a “transitional process” that would last until the next election in 2015.

“President Kiir will stay in power until the elections take place,” he said.

Machar has called for Kiir to resign, saying he lost the people’s trust after fighting broke out in the presidential guard in December and quickly spread across the country, which is about the size of Texas.

Thousands of civilians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes.

Growing frustration

In a sign of growing frustration at the failure of South Sudan’s leaders to end the bloodshed, the United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on two commanders on opposing sides of the ethnic violence.

The sanctions were imposed under an executive order that US President Barack Obama signed in April to hold to account those responsible for the unrest in South Sudan — whose secession from Sudan in 2011 was seen as a major US policy success.

Norway, another of South Sudan’s main Western sponsors and donors, also made clear that its patience was running out.

“We made it clear that the international community will react even firmer in the coming months if they don’t take responsibility in ending the fighting and find a solution for an inclusive government for the future,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Bende told Reuters in Addis Ababa.

Benjamin said in Juba that he had understood from Kerry that the regional African group IGAD, which is sponsoring the peace talks, would take the lead on any foreign sanctions.

“We were surprised that the United States pre-empted what they had agreed upon,” he said, although he added that he doubted relations with Washington would be damaged.

The sanctions targeted Peter Gadet, an army commander loyal to Machar, and Major General Marial Chanuong, head of Kiir’s presidential guard. One US official said both men had “blood on their hands”.

DUBAI — Saudi Arabia replaced the head of Jeddah’s King Fahd Hospital on Tuesday as it struggled with mounting deaths from the SARS-like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome ahead of an influx of Muslim pilgrims in July.

The health ministry said on its website the move aimed to fight the spread of the virus and would “guarantee the immediate improvement of the medical care service” in the hospital, where a number of MERS patients are being treated.

In a separate statement, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said outbreaks of MERS in Jeddah’s two main hospitals — King Fahd and King Faisal — were partly due to “breaches” in its recommended infection prevention and control measures.

But current evidence indicated there has been no significant change in the virus’ ability to spread, the WHO said after a five-day mission by a team of experts to Saudi Arabia.

“The majority of human-to-human infections occurred in healthcare facilities. One quarter of all cases have been healthcare workers,” WHO said.

There was a clear need to improve healthcare workers’ knowledge and attitudes about the disease and systematically apply WHO’s recommended measures in healthcare facilities.

Saudi Arabia has reported 431 cases of MERS since the disease was identified in 2012, of which 117 have been fatal, according to the latest figures posted on the ministry website.

The spread of new infections slowed during the winter, but there has been a sudden increase since last month, with many of the new cases recorded in Jeddah, the kingdom’s second city.

Two deaths were reported on Tuesday, along with 10 new cases in Jeddah, in the capital Riyadh, in the western city of Taif and in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The upsurge is of particular concern because of the influx of pilgrims from around the world expected in July during the holy month of Ramadan.

Amid growing public disquiet at the spread of the disease, King Abdullah sacked his health minister on April 21.

The authorities have at times struggled to counter rumours swirling on social media that they have not been transparent about the spread of the disease and the effectiveness of the prevention measures implemented so far.

MERS is a coronavirus like SARS, which killed around 800 people worldwide after first appearing in China in 2002. It can cause coughing, fever and pneumonia and there is no vaccine or anti-viral treatment against it.

Scientists say MERS does not transmit easily between people, although it could mutate. The most likely animal reservoir from which new cases are becoming infected is Saudi Arabia’s large population of camels.

Arab countries including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Tunisia have all reported cases of MERS, as well as several countries in Europe.

Last week, the United States confirmed its first case, a man who had been a health worker in Saudi Arabia.

BEIRUT — The timing of an evacuation of rebels from the central Syrian city of Homs under a deal with government forces has not been set and could still take days to arrange, the provincial governor said on Tuesday.

The withdrawal of the insurgents from Homs — a city once called "the capital of the revolution" — would amount to a major symbolic victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad but has been delayed since a ceasefire was agreed on Friday.

Rebels have held out in the Old City district and several other areas despite being undersupplied, outgunned and subjected to more than a year of siege by Assad's forces.

Homs governor Talal Barazi said arrangements for any withdrawal would take time and declined to say when it would likely happen.

"The conditions are helpful and the atmosphere is suitable for achieving positive steps toward settlement and reconciliation and the exit of armed groups, but we have not set a date yet," he told Al Manar television, run by Assad ally Hizbollah.

"The next few days will witness, God willing, steps like this, and we hope there will be a date soon," he added.

The reasons for the delay were not immediately clear, but the pull-out is part of a multifaceted arrangement that also includes allowing food and medical aid into the largely Shiite towns of Nubl and Al Zahraa in the northern province of Aleppo which have been besieged by rebels for more than a year.

The rebels fighting to overthrow Assad are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, while the president’s allies include Shiite Iran and Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbollah. Assad is an Alawite, a sect derived from Shi’ite Islam.

Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the United Nations and local councils had mediated the talks between rebel groups on one side and government forces, loyalist militias, Hizbollah and the provincial government on the other.

Representatives from the Russian and Iranian embassies had been present, but it was not clear if they were taking part in the negotiations, the group said.

The observatory said the government would take control of Al Waer neighbourhood in addition to entering the areas of Juret Al Shayah, Al Qarabis, Al Hamidiya, Wadi Al Sayih and the Old City in Homs.

The fighters would be allowed to keep light weapons to defend themselves against any breach of the agreement, it said.

More than 150,000 people have died in the rebellion against Assad. Millions more have fled their homes and the government has lost control of swathes of territory across the north and east. Fighting regularly kills over 200 people a day.

Despite the carnage, Syrian authorities have scheduled presidential elections for June 3, a vote likely to give Assad a third term in office. Assad’s opponents have dimissed the election as a farce.