Region

CARACAS — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pledged Friday to send oil and diesel to the Palestinian Authority, as part of agreements signed with its leader Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Caracas.

Venezuela, which sits atop the world’s largest oil reserves, said it would provide an initial shipment of 240,000 barrels of oil, but gave no details as to how it would send them.

“Thanks to Venezuela for supporting Palestine... to break Israel’s monopoly on our economy, for your response to our needs, for your willingness to support the Palestinian people in their long struggle,” Abbas said, according to an official translation.

During the meeting, Maduro also agreed to support the Palestinian Authority’s quest to be granted observer status in three Latin American regional organisations: The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

“The Palestinian people have the right to maintain commercial relations with the world as well,” Maduro said.

During his third visit to Venezuela in five years, Abbas visited the grave of Maduro’s predecessor, longtime leader Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer last year.

Abbas arrived in Caracas on Thursday after meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry in London the day before, a first since the peace process between the Palestinians and Israelis collapsed.

Abbas’ visit comes amid months of at times bloody protests that have rocked Venezuela since February.

Maduro has called the unrest, which has claimed at least 42 lives, a coup attempt backed by the United States, raising tensions with Washington, which has repeatedly denied the claim.

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s powerful Hizbollah movement said Friday it had warned the Maronite patriarch of the “negative repercussions” of his plan to accompany Pope Francis to Jerusalem this month.

“We presented our perspective and point of view and laid out what we see as the negative repercussions of this visit,” Ibrahim Amin Al Sayed, head of the group’s political council, said after meeting Patriarch Beshara Rai.

Sayed said the group hoped “that this perspective is taken into account”.

Rai is set to become the first Maronite patriarch to visit Jerusalem since it came under full Israeli control after the 1967 war.

The decision to join Pope Francis on his May 24-26 trip has caused some controversy in Lebanon, which is technically at war with Israel and bans its citizens from visiting Israel.

Rai has defended the visit as a purely religious matter, and said he has a duty to welcome the Pope in Jerusalem.

“The Pope is going to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. He is going to the diocese of the patriarch, so it’s normal that the patriarch should welcome him,” Rai told AFP this month.

Hizbollah, which fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006, had previously declined to comment on the trip, although a leading newspaper close to the movement called it a “historic sin”.

Sayed said the group understood Rai’s intentions, “but we talked about the risks and drawbacks of the trip in terms of repercussions at the level of Lebanon and of the Israeli entity”, he said.

Despite the Israel travel ban, Lebanon’s Maronite clergy are allowed to travel to the Holy Land to minister to around 10,000 faithful there.

Rai’s deputy Boulos Sayyah, who will accompany him, has said the patriarch would not participate in any political meetings in Israel but will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Maronite church has its roots in the early 5th century and is named after a hermit, St Maron.

It has its own distinct theology, spirituality, liturgy and code of canon law but is in full communion with Rome.

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s President Michel Sleiman on Saturday urged Hizbollah to withdraw its forces from Syria to avoid future repercussions on the tiny Arab state that suffered through 15 years of its own civil war.

Sleiman made his comments in the mountain village of Brih during a ceremony on reconciliation between the Druse and Christian community in the area that witnessed deadly sectarian violence during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war.

“I appeal for the return to Lebanon and to withdraw from neighbouring arenas to avoid future repercussions on Lebanon,” said Sleiman, a critic of Hizbollah backing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces.

Hizbollah, which openly joined the battles in Syria last year, is not likely to abide by Sleiman’s call. Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to keep his fighters in Syria as long as needed to shore up Assad’s struggle against Syria’s rebels.

The Hizbollah fighters have been instrumental to Assad’s success on the battlefield, and support from the Iranian-backed group appears to have tipped the balance into the government’s favour — especially in areas on the border with Lebanon and near the Syrian capital of Damascus.

Sleiman’s comments came a week before his six-year term ends.

Meanwhile in Syria, members of Al Qaeda breakaway group called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant beheaded a local rebel commander of a rival group, activists said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the Ahrar Al Sham commander known as Abu Al Miqdam went missing four days ago. It said the man was found beheaded Friday in the central province of Hama.

Many rebels referred to Abu Al Miqdam as the “tank sniper” for his role in firing rockets at Syrian army tanks, according to opposition websites.

The Islamic State and rival Islamic groups including Ahrar Al Sham have been fighting each other in northern and eastern Syria since January. Activists say the internal fighting killed more than 6,000 people.

Meanwhile, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned a cut in water supplies in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo that he said has deprived at least 2.5 million people of access to potable water.

In a statement released by his office late Friday, Ban noted that denying civilians essential supplies is a breach of international and humanitarian law.

Rebels from the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front shut down the main water pumping station in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, nearly two weeks ago to punish civilians living on the government-controlled side of the divided metropolis, the observatory’s Rami Abdurrahman said.

Abdurrahman, whose group collects information from activists inside Syria, said that the Nusra Front has tried to restart the water station, but that supplies are erratic and remain largely cut.

“They don’t have specialists to deal with the pumps, and they’ve damaged the station,” Abdurrahman said. “They’ve tried to resume pumping. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The water comes and goes, but until now it’s not flowing as usual.”

Some residents have resorted to drinking polluted well water distributed in buckets and plastic jerry cans.

LONDON — Western and Arab nations vowed Thursday to step up assistance for Syria's moderate opposition, while the US said "raw data" suggested chlorine had been used as a chemical weapon in the conflict.

The Friends of Syria group meeting in London poured scorn on Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime's plan to hold presidential elections in June, saying it was an "insult" while the civil war was still raging.

As they met, a car bomb killed at least 29 people on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey, a monitoring group said.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the regime's plan to hold a presidential election on June 3 was "an insult" to the Syrian people and would be a "fraud".

A joint statement from the 11 countries at the London talks described the election as "illegitimate".

The Friends of Syria group — Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States — was meeting for the first time since January.

Kerry said after the talks that “raw data” suggested chlorine had been used in Syria, supporting accusations made by France.

“I’ve seen the raw data that suggests that there may have been, as France has suggested, a number of instances in which chlorine has been used in the conduct of war,” Kerry said.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius suggested this week that the regime of President Bashar Assad had used chemical weapons 14 times since October, including chlorine.

US frustration with aid blockade 

Kerry also voiced US frustration over blockages of aid to the Syrian population and said it was open to new ways of delivering essential supplies.

“We are open to the idea of providing aid through any means to get to the people who need it,” Kerry said.

Under a UN-brokered agreement the Syrian regime is currently responsible for organising the distribution of aid through NGOs.

“We are very frustrated with the current process. It is not getting to the people, it is going through one gateway,” Kerry said.

The UN’s director of aid operations in Syria, John Ging, last week accused the government of blockading medical supplies bound for opposition areas, calling it an “abomination”.

In a diplomatic boost to the Syrian opposition, Britain announced it had upgraded the status of their London office to a mission.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the move was being made “in recognition of the strength of our partnership” with the National Coalition headed by Ahmad Jarba.

Britain will also provide an extra £30 million ($50 million, 37 million euros) in “practical support” for the opposition, Hague said.

Jarba took part in the London talks after attending a week of high-level meetings in Washington in a bid to strengthen US support for the rebels.

In Washington, Jarba pleaded for anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down regime aircraft which are dropping deadly barrel bombs on Syrian civilians.

More blood was shed in Syria on Thursday, when a car bomb tore through a crowd at the Bab Al Salama border crossing with Turkey, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

At least 29 civilians were killed, including five women and three children.

Gruesome photographs posted online by activists showed distraught men standing over charred bodies.

A video of the scene on YouTube showed smoke rising from the twisted remains of a blown-up car.

RAMALLAH — Israeli occupation forces shot dead two Palestinians on Thursday during a demonstration in the West Bank marking the 66th anniversary of the Nakbeh, or "catastrophe" of Israel's creation.

Security and medical sources told AFP that Musaab Nuwarah, 20, and Mohammed Udeh, 17, died in a Ramallah hospital after being shot in the chest during a protest near Ofer jail to demand the release of thousands of Palestinians held by Israel.

The latest fatalities brought the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year to 11.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

At Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, protesters set fire to tyres and hurled stones at Israeli forces who responded with "riot dispersal means", an army spokesman told AFP, referring to the use of rubber bullets and tear gas.

Other Palestinian rallies for Nakbeh Day were held in the northern city of Nablus, and in Hebron in the south of the West Bank.

Hundreds of people, some carrying Palestinian flags or banners calling for refugees to be allowed to return to their former homes, marched in the Gaza Strip near the Erez Crossing with Israel.

In Ramallah, where Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has his headquarters, people stood in silence on the streets for 66 seconds while sirens wailed.

"On this 66th anniversary of the Nakbeh, we hope this year will be the one in which our long suffering ends," Abbas said in a speech broadcast on Palestinian TV and radio late Wednesday.

"It is time to put an end to the longest occupation in modern history and time for Israel's leaders to understand that there is no other homeland for the Palestinians but Palestine," he said.

After nearly nine months of fruitless US-sponsored peace talks, Israel suspended its participation in negotiations last month when Abbas's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) announced a unity deal with the Islamist movement Hamas which who runs Gaza.

Nation law 

On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Palestinians of teaching their children that Israel "should be made to disappear".

The Israeli answer was to “continue building our country and our unified capital, Jerusalem”, said the rightwing premier.

“Another answer to the Nakbeh is our passing the Nation Law, clarifying to the world that Israel is the State of the Jewish people,” he said in remarks relayed by his office.

Netanyahu has pledged to enshrine Israel’s status as the national homeland of the Jewish people in law.

He has repeatedly demanded Palestinian recognition of Israel’s status, but Abbas has flatly refused.

In 1948, more than 760,000 Palestinians — now estimated to number more than 5 million with their descendants — fled or were driven out of their homes.

Around 160,000 stayed behind and became Israeli citizens.

They and their descendants currently number about 1.4 million people, or some 20 per cent of Israel’s population.

Palestinian chief peace negotiator Saeb Erekat, in a commentary published in Israel’s left-leaning daily Haaretz, said the PLO has officially recognised Israel’s right to exist since 1988.

“We are not asking for Hebrew not to be an official language or Jewish holidays not to be official holidays. The character of Israel is not for us to define,” he wrote.

But “the concept of an exclusively Jewish state necessarily implies the negation of the Nakbeh.”

KUWAIT CITY — Kuwait’s parliament on Thursday accepted the resignations of five MPs who quit because the pro-government chamber refused to question the prime minister about allegations of corruption and mismanagement.

Speaker Marzouk Al Ghanem declared the five seats vacant after separate votes on each of the MPs following a lengthy debate. An overwhelming majority of MPs and Cabinet ministers approved the resignations.

The five, who include the only woman in the 50-seat parliament, were not present. Elections for their replacements must now be held within 60 days.

Opposition MPs Riyadh Al Adasani, Abdulkarim Al Kundari and Hussein Al Mutairi quit two weeks ago after parliament rejected their demand to question Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Mubarak Al Sabah, a senior member of the ruling family, over allegations he gave cash handouts to lawmakers.

Four days later, Ali Al Rashed, a former parliament speaker, and Safa Al Hashem resigned, saying the situation in the Gulf state had reached a “deadlock”.

During Thursday’s debate, several MPs strongly objected to the parliament’s unprecedented action of rejecting a grilling for the premier.

“What happened was a breach of the constitution and an attempt to silence MPs,” Islamist member Hamdan Al Azemi told the house.

This is the first mass resignation by Kuwaiti MPs since 1967 when several quit in protest at allegations of election rigging. Kuwait is the first country in the Gulf Arab region to have a constitution and elected parliament.

CAIRO — Egyptian expatriates began lining up Thursday at polling places in more than 100 countries to cast ballots in four days of voting for Egypt’s coming presidential election.

Egyptians dropped their votes into clear ballot boxes at consulates and embassies across the world, with Gulf countries and Australia seeing a relatively high turnout, Egypt’s foreign ministry said. In Jordan, a crowd waved the Egyptian flag and cheered the vote.

The voting comes ahead of Egypt’s May 26-27 vote to elect a new president after last year’s military overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first freely elected president. Retired Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who led the July 3 overthrow after millions protested against Morsi, is widely expected to win on a wave of nationalistic, anti-Islamist fervour.

Sisi faces leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, who has the support of youth groups who led the 2011 uprising against autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

There are nearly 600,000 registered Egyptian expatriate voters around the world. Arab countries, especially the Gulf monarchies and the United States, have large presence of Egyptian expatriates.

Morsi’s supporters, including his Muslim Brotherhood, say they’ll boycott the vote.

RIYADH — Health authorities in Saudi Arabia on Thursday announced the deaths of another three people from the MERS respiratory virus, taking the country’s toll to 160.

The health ministry’s daily bulletin on the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in the Gulf nation said the latest people to die were two women aged 72 and 54 and a 63-year-old man.

Since MERS first appeared in Saudi Arabia in 2012 the authorities have recorded 514 infections from the mystery virus for which there is currently no known antidote.

Other nations including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates and the United States have also recorded cases, mostly in people who had been to the kingdom.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation said its emergency committee, which includes global medical and policy experts, had flagged mounting concerns about the potentially fatal virus.

The WHO called on countries to improve infection prevention and control, collect more data on the virus and to be vigilant in preventing it from spreading to vulnerable countries, notably in Africa.

But it has so far stopped short of declaring an international health emergency, which would have far-reaching implications such as travel and trade restrictions on affected countries.

A WHO team carried out a five-day inspection visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this month and pinpointed breaches in its recommended infection prevention measures as being partly responsible for the spike in hospital infections.

A rash of cases among staff at Jeddah’s King Fahd Hospital last month sparked public panic and the dismissal of its director and the health minister.

MERS is considered a deadlier but less transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that appeared in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, 9 per cent of whom died.

Like SARS, it appears to cause a lung infection, with patients suffering coughing, breathing difficulties and a temperature. But MERS differs in that it also causes rapid kidney failure.

BAGHDAD — Militants killed 10 people in an assault on a Baghdad court involving suicide bombers and shot dead five army officers in attacks Thursday amid a surge of post-election violence.

The attacks were the worst in unrest that left 20 people dead nationwide, part of a protracted spike in bloodshed as officials tally votes from Iraq’s April 30 parliamentary election.

The authorities have blamed a variety of external factors for the violence, such as the civil war in neighbouring Syria, but critics say the Shiite-led government must do more to reach out to disgruntled minority Sunnis in order to undermine support for militancy.

In Thursday’s deadliest attack, militants assaulted a court in central Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding dozens more.

Twin suicide bombings, one of which involved an attacker setting off a car bomb, came minutes apart during morning rush hour in the commercial district of Karrada, near a crossroads that is the site of a hospital, a police headquarters and the court complex.

“What happened near the Karrada court was an attempt by terrorists to break into the court,” said Baghdad security spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan, adding that security forces had “foiled” the assault.

Maan also added that “we lost some security forces” in the first blast, and said the overall toll could have been higher still had security personnel not killed a third suicide attacker.

Ambulances rushed to the scene of the attacks as smoke rose above the city, while security forces closed off nearby roads, worsening already tight morning gridlock.

Elsewhere in Baghdad on Thursday, a car bomb near a row of shops in a predominantly Shiite neighbourhood killed at least three people, while violence outside the capital left seven dead.

In Salaheddin province, militants seized a vehicle transporting five off-duty army officers in civilian clothes and killed them, officials said.

The car’s driver was set free, however.

The officers, who varied in rank between lieutenant and major, were on their way to their unit which is part of the force battling anti-government fighters in the western province of Anbar.

The violence comes two days after a wave of nationwide bloodshed, including nine car bombs in Baghdad alone, killed 42 people in Iraq’s deadliest day since the general election.

The security forces have trumpeted wide-ranging operations targeting militants, and on Thursday said they killed at least 80 militants, the vast majority of them west of Baghdad in areas that have been contested between government forces and insurgents.

Despite the authorities’ claims that the offensives are having an impact, the violence has continued unabated.

Thursday’s violence was the latest in a protracted surge that has killed more than 3,300 people this year.

Results from last month’s election are not expected until later this month, but political parties have already begun manoeuvring to try to form alliances, with incumbent Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki bidding for a third term in power.

Maliki’s opponents blame him for a marked deterioration in security as well as what they say is insufficient improvement in basic services and rampant corruption.

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip — A 1975 photo shows Palestinian refugee Fathiyeh Sattari, her eyes wide with worry, as she presents her malnourished baby boy to a doctor at a clinic run by a UN aid agency.

The photo is one of 525,000 in the agency’s archive being digitised to preserve a record of one of the world’s most entrenched refugee problems, created in what the Palestinians call the “Nakbeh,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic — their uprooting in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation.

As Palestinians marked the Nakbeh’s 66th anniversary Thursday, the photos tell the story of the refugee crisis’ transition from temporary to seemingly permanent. Tent camps of the 1950s have turned into urban slums with some alleys so narrow residents can only walk single file past drab multi-storey buildings.

The mother and son of the 1975 photo are part of a family that is now in its fourth generation as refugees. Sattari’s parents fled their home in what is now Israel in 1948. Fathiyeh was born in the Gaza Strip and raised her own family in the Rafah refugee camp. Her son Hassan — the baby with the gaunt face in the photo — is now a 40-year-old father of five, living in another camp.

They appear resigned to never being able to return to their ancestral home. Hassan said he doesn’t believe Israel would ever agree to take back large numbers of refugees who, along with their descendants, now number more than 5 million across the Middle East.

“Without confrontation, we can’t go back,” he told The Associated Press. Instead, he’s banking on education for his children to help them escape. He said he was taking time off from work as a government auditor this week to help his 9-year-old son Abdel-Hai prepare for final exams.

He said he’s too busy to mark the Nakbeh, commemorated each year in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with speeches and wailing sirens on May 15, a day after Israel was founded in 1948.

This year’s commemorations come after a new blow to prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that could include a political solution for the Palestinian refugees. US-brokered negotiations fell apart in April, the latest in more than two decades of failed attempts to set up a Palestinian state next to Israel.

The fate of the refugees is one of the most contentious issues on the table.

Israel opposes a mass return, fearing it would dilute the state’s Jewish majority. In the Palestinian public discourse, a large-scale return is still portrayed as the main goal. The Palestinian leadership has said each refugee has the right to choose his or her fate, including return or resettlement in a state of Palestine or third countries, but also hinted at flexibility in the context of a final deal.

According to UN figures, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out in the 1948 Mideast war, many settling in the neighbouring West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Tens of thousands more were displaced in the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, lands the Palestinians seek for a state.

Today, some 1.5 million refugees remain in the region’s 58 camps, where the UN Relief and Works Agency has provided education, medical care and food since it was created in 1950 to help uprooted Palestinians. In countries where host governments were more welcoming, such as Syria and Jordan, fewer refugees remained in camps than, for example, in Lebanon.

From the start, the UN agency documented the exodus, accumulating more than 430,000 negatives, 10,000 prints, 85,000 slides, 75 films and 730 video cassettes. In 2009, the UN cultural agency UNESCO inscribed the archive in its Memory of the World List, recognising its historic value.

Last year, the $1 million digitisation began with funding from Denmark, France and the Palestinian private sector. Most of the work is being done at the Danish Royal Library, while more than 50,000 photos are processed in Gaza.

An online database already has close to 2,000 images. In addition, 50 prints were displayed in an exhibit, “The Long Journey”, which opened in Jerusalem in November, then traveled to Amman, and is to reach Gaza, the West Bank and the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

The photo of Hassan and Fathiyeh Sattari will be part of the Gaza exhibit, said Lionello Boscardi of the UN aid agency. He said the photos show the resilience of the refugees and also the UN agency’s efforts to provide basic services.

Fathiyeh Sattari said UN aid was crucial for her family.

She was born in Gaza, three years after her parents fled their village of Sattariyeh in what is now central Israel. She married a cousin, Hamdan, and raised 11 children in a room in the Rafah refugee camp.

The 1975 photo shows her with her second-oldest, Hassan, at a UN clinic. She said Hassan was emaciated because of an infection and because she had trouble breastfeeding.

For years, her husband and others in the camp worked in Israel as day labourers. A brother-in-law, Ibrahim, worked in Israel’s Rishon Lezion, near the ancestral village, of which only a few houses remain. The children studied in UN schools, and one of Fathiyeh’s five sons works as a physician in Italy.

After the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising in 2000, Israel kept out Gaza workers, and the Sattaris became more dependent on UN aid, including packages of rice, sugar and cooking oil.

Today more than 800,000 refugees in Gaza receive food aid, UN officials said. Refugees make up the majority of the population of 1.7 million in the tiny Mediterranean coastal strip, where poverty has deepened since Israel and Egypt blockaded the territory following a takeover by the Islamic Hamas in 2007.

Hassan Sattari is ambivalent about the aid. He received a good education, but believes the support inadvertently prolonged Palestinian exile. “Without UNRWA, there would have been greater pressure for a solution,” he said.

Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency, dismissed that idea.

“What perpetuates the refugee problem is the failure of the political parties to solve it,” he said.