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GAZA — Life has never seemed so grim for the Mustafas, a family of seven cramped into a shabby two-room hovel in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp.

Seven years into an Israeli blockade and ten months into a crippling Egyptian one, Gaza’s economic growth has evaporated and unemployment soared to almost 40 per cent by the end of 2013.

Opposition to the Hamas group which runs the Gaza Strip has led its neighbours to quarantine the enclave, shutting residents out of the struggling Mideast peace process and leaving them with plenty of parties to blame.

Living on UN handouts of rice, flour, canned meat and sunflower oil, with limited access to proper healthcare or clean water, families like the Mustafas — seemingly permanent refugees from ancestral lands now part of Israel — have no money, no jobs and no hope.

“We’re drowning... We feel like the whole world is on top of us. I turn on the television and I see the lifestyles on there, and I think, God help me leave this place,” said Tareq, 22.

The Mustafas often must pick up and move when rain floods their low-lying home — even on a sunny day, it’s lined with slick, smelly mildew. They stand in the dark, as 12-hour power cuts are now the norm throughout Gaza due to scant fuel.

“There’s no money for university or to get married. There’s not even enough to spend outside the house so we can escape a little. What kind of life is this?” Tareq asks.

Well over half of Gaza residents receive food from the United Nations, and the number is on the rise.

UNRWA, the UN Refugee Works Agency devoted to feeding and housing the refugees, told Reuters it was now feeding some 820,000, up by 40,000 in the last year. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) gives food aid to some 180,000 other residents.

Shock to the population

More than 1.2 million of 1.8 million Gazans are refugees or their descendants who fled or were driven from land that became part of Israel in the war of its foundation in 1948.

As decades passed, the hand of occupation variously clenched or relaxed through wars and uprisings. Groups of tents slowly morphed into concrete ghettos — eight camps in total — where chances for change feel as narrow as the claustrophobic alleys.

“Gaza just seems to keep descending further into poverty and de-development of the economy,” said Scott Anderson, deputy director of operations at UNRWA, noting that the level of aid dependency faced by Gaza has few parallels in the world.

“In terms of economic shock to a population, probably somewhere like Sierra Leone might be the only place where people experience what the people of Gaza experience on a daily basis,” he told Reuters.

The crisis is pulling down the Strip’s most vulnerable, not just among its poor but also its sick. While basic health and economic indicators outstrip much of Africa, the rising level of aid dependency and sense of confinement takes a constant toll.

Cancer struggles

Eman Shannan, who runs a support group for cancer patients and writes about Gaza life, told Reuters that treatment for the disease has been rendered agonizing by travel curbs at the Egyptian border, a lack of medicine and careless officialdom.

“We are headed for disaster. Five new cases come into the office every day... Cancer doesn’t kill as much as the circumstances around us do. People can survive cancer, but not this,” said Shannan, herself a survivor.

There are 13,000 sufferers in the Strip and it is the second highest cause of death among Palestinians after heart disease.

Farha Al Fayyumi, a breast cancer patient from the Shujaiya Refugee Camp in central Gaza complains that her teeth are throbbing — medicines used to offset the effects of her years of chemotherapy treatments are not available in Gaza.

Once the a main conduit for Gazans seeking treatment abroad, the crossing with neighbouring Egypt is now only open to people, including the sick, around two days each month. More and more, poverty is also staunching the flow.

“I haven’t been to Egypt for treatment for a year-and-a-half. I can’t afford the travel expenses,” said Al Fayyumi, a widow with eight children clad in a head-to-toe black niqab body cloak.

Treatment in Gaza was rendered harder by the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords because radiation chemotherapy, the two sides agreed, could have military applications. Only five practicing oncologists remain in Gaza, Shannan notes with gloom. 

Blame 

In northern Gaza’s green farmland, Mahmoud blames Hamas for much of the suffering.

“Do things ever change for their gang? If jobs open up, their people get them. They never suffer,” said the 23-year-old, who studied to be an electrician, then a truck driver, but found work as neither.

Hamas denies corruption and says it governs transparently, mostly blaming Israel for the Strip’s economic woes.

Mahmoud’s father, a farmer, sits in a flowing brown robe and rests his cane over his knees in a sunny enclosure next to his family house.

The 67-year-old remembers the orchards in his 180,000 square metres of land astride Israel’s border where olives, lemons and oranges once thrived in the area’s sweet well water.

Long since demolished by Israeli bulldozers amid cross-border violence in 2008, the orchard lives on only in his small garden. In it stands one of every type of tree he used to tend — a reminder of what he’s lost and of the steady erosion of land and livelihoods that Palestinians have endured over the decades.

Contamination of the aquifer means the family’s water is now brackish and undrinkable. Like many Gazans, they pay to have it filtered.

“When they closed the land, life ended.” he sighed. “We used to sell the fruit of our trees, now we buy from Egypt and Israel, but only when we can afford it.”

Grumbling at their leaders’ perceived incompetence is common among residents, but many said Gazans would remain behind Hamas because of its militancy.

“The whole world is against them. They’re not angels of course. They’ve made a lot of mistakes. But if they went ahead and recognised Israel, the people here would spit on them — their popularity would evaporate overnight,” said Zakaria Shurafa, a driver picking up his family’s ration of UN food aid at a busy distribution centre by the Beach Refugee Camp.

“I don’t see any possibility of a revolt, though I’m sure Israel’s blockade is trying at that... it’s no use, we’re used to this kind of life.”

Mahmoud, the jobless youth, lamented how the economic deadlock was dragging down society, and his dreams of what he could accomplish.

“In conditions like this, you feel people’s hatred grow, their jealousy of each other grow. Young people take tramadol [drugs], there’s robbery. These things didn’t use to happen,” he said.

“When you’re young you think that, as an adult, you will be able to do more, that the world will become more open to you. But here, we found that as we grew older, our problems only grew.”

ERBIL, Iraq — Iraqi Kurds are digging a 17km trench on their border with Syria, reinforcing a political faultline between the two rival parties that dominate on either side of the frontier.

Iraqi Kurdish authorities say the ditch, which is approximately 3 metres deep and 2 metres wide, will help reduce smuggling and keep Islamists out of their relatively stable region as war grinds on in Syria.

But the Kurdish group that controls the Syrian side of the border says the ditch is designed to tighten a blockade against its enclave, and force it to submit to the authority of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Iraq.

Whatever the motive, the ditch is highly symbolic, fortifying one of the frontiers regarded by many Kurds as a historic injustice that carved their ethnic homeland up into four parts spread across Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

It also illustrates the growing rifts and competition between Kurds across borders, and their ties to regional powers. People on the Syrian side protesting against the ditch have been shovelling soil and using their bare hands to refill it.

In Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) has emerged as the most powerful Kurdish political group since civil war broke out more than three years ago, and in January declared self-rule in the country’s northeast, bordering Turkey and Iraq.

Authorities in the Iraqi Kurdish province of Duhok abutting Syria denied the ditch was being dug for political reasons and said an official border crossing remained open for those who wished to travel back and forth.

“The measures that were recently taken in digging a ditch on the Syrian border are a result of the deterioration of security,” read a statement posted on the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) website.

Kurdistan has largely managed to insulate itself against the violence afflicting Syria and the rest of Iraq, providing refuge for thousands, but a bombing last year in the capital Erbil put the region on its guard.

That attack was claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is active in Sunni Erab dominated provinces south of the region, and across the border in Syria, where it has been fighting Kurds. 

‘Barbed wire and walls’

A senior KRG official said the ditch was no different from those dug around the cities of Erbil or Kirkuk for security, but the PYD has likened it to the “wall of shame” built by Turkey along its boundary with Syria’s Kurdish areas.

Turkey is unnerved by the Kurds’ growing clout in Syria, having fought for three decades on its own soil against the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is close to the PYD.

“At a time when everybody is looking forward for the elimination of barbed wire and walls dividing Kurdistan, digging border ditches... is quite an eye-opening move,” the PKK said in a statement.

“The ditch digging ... makes the enemies of the Kurds happy, for they have always benefited from the divisions and problems among the Kurds”.

The PYD accuses those digging the trench of acting on the behest of Ankara, which has cultivated ties with the KDP, led by Iraqi Kurdistan’s President Massoud Barzani.

The KDP backs several smaller parties in Syria that recently merged to form the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria (KDPS).

Even before work on the ditch began, the PYD complained it was not allowed to traverse the border freely, and last year took control of the Yaaroubiya crossing with Iraq, which lies beyond the control of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The PYD has since been using that border to get aid into Syria, with the approval of the Iraqi central government in Baghdad.

The controversy over the ditch is also being used by the KDP’s rivals within Iraqi Kurdistan ahead of elections at the end of April.

A senior member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) described the ditch as “unnecessary” and questioned why it had not been dug sooner if its real purpose was to secure the region.

“We are not happy about it,” said a senior PUK member, on condition of anonymity.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Thousands of Jews prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday, after a series of clashes at the adjacent flashpoint Al Aqsa Mosque compound.

Ahead of the ceremony, Israeli security forces blocked access for non-Muslims to the highly sensitive holy site, which is directly above the Western Wall plaza, Israeli spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.

Rosenfeld said the move was to prevent clashes, and the prayers took place without incident.

Palestinians and security forces clashed on Wednesday and last Sunday after Jewish visitors were allowed into the compound, known to Muslims as Al Haram Al Sharif, Islam’s third holiest shrine.

Rosenfeld said six young Palestinians had been arrested in suspicion of involvement in Wednesday’s clashes.

Jews are celebrating Passover, a seven-day holiday which in ancient times was marked by mass pilgrimage to the compound that now houses Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and is known to Jews as the Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest place.

Muslims are intensely sensitive to any perceived threat to the status of the compound and many believe extremist Jews are determined to build a new temple on the wide esplanade.

Jews are not allowed to pray at Al Haram Al Sharif.

Rosenfeld highlighted security preparations for the Friday weekly prayers at Al Aqsa compound, as well as the Holy Fire rite, which takes place the day before Easter Sunday in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City.

A spokesperson for the Israeli defence ministry unit responsible for coordinating civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories told AFP that Tel Aviv had given 17,000 West Bank Christians entry permits into Israel and East Jerusalem for Easter events.

He said 500 Palestinian Christians from Gaza were also given entry permits into Israel and the West Bank for Easter.

BEIRUT — International mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said on Thursday that a deal between trapped fighters and civilians in Homs city and the Syrian authorities had broken down, as government forces appeared close to retaking the besieged opposition area.

Homs, a religiously-mixed city, was the scene of early protests against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 and has become a symbol of the destructive nature of Syria’s civil war, with many of its neighbourhoods levelled by army shells.

Hundreds of people remain trapped in the old part of the city, surrounded by government forces and pro-Assad militia. A deal agreed at peace talks in Geneva this year allowed some civilians to leave but further negotiations broke down following heavy fighting this week.

“It is a matter of deep regret that negotiations were brutally stopped and violence is now rife again when a comprehensive agreement seemed close at hand,” Brahimi said in a statement.

“It is alarming that Homs, whose people have suffered so much throughout these past three years is again the theatre of death and destruction.”

In recent months, government forces have recaptured several rebel-held areas and border towns, closing off rebel supply routes from Lebanon and securing the main highway leading north from Damascus towards central Syria, Homs and the Mediterranean.

The opposition National Coalition, a political body in exile, warned of a massacre if Assad’s forces were to push through into the small pocket of rebel-held Homs.

“We warn the international community of a potential massacre in Homs. The Old City has been besieged by regime forces for 676 days,” it said in a statement.

Monzer Akbik, spokesman for the group, said it was “critical that the eyes of the world remain fixed on Homs at this crucial time. The regime has reduced what was the soul of the revolution to rubble and ruin”.

More than 150,000 people have been killed in the civil war, which began as peaceful protests against Assad’s rule, a third of them civilians, according to the anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Millions have fled the country.

JUBA — Rebels in South Sudan battled government forces Thursday in a renewed offensive targeting the young nation’s key oil fields, the army said, amid famine warnings by the United Nations.

Fighters loyal to rebel chief Riek Machar recaptured the town of Bentiu on Tuesday, the state capital of oil-producing Unity, with UN peacekeepers reporting corpses littering the streets.

South Sudan’s army said fighting was ongoing Thursday as it tried to counterattack.

“Bentiu is still under the hands of the rebels but we are closing in,” army spokesman Philip Auger told AFP. “There is still fighting.”

The surge in fighting in the four-month-long conflict comes amid warnings by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that more than one million people are at risk of famine in the war-torn country.

Peacekeepers from the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) patrolling the rebel-held state capital said they had seen between 35 and 40 bodies along the roadside, the majority in
military uniform.

“UNMISS condemns these renewed hostilities in the strongest possible terms,” the mission said in a statement, saying it was “gravely concerned” at the “serious violations” of a broken ceasefire deal inked in January.

“Fighting will only exacerbate an already dire situation,” it added.

Bentiu, one of the most bitterly contested regions in the war, is the first major settlement to have been retaken in a fresh offensive by forces of rebel leader Riek Machar, a former vice president.

The conflict in South Sudan has left thousands dead and forced around a million people to flee their homes since fighting broke out on December 15 in the capital Juba before spreading to other states in the oil rich nation.

Over 12,000 civilians are now sheltering inside the UN base in Bentiu, protected by peacekeepers, with one person wounded inside the camp as bullets hit it from a nearby firefight.

Rebels overran the town on Tuesday, with the army saying it was preparing a counterattack to take it back.

Rebels had previously seized Bentiu in December at the beginning of the conflict, but were chased out a month later.

On Monday, UN peacekeepers rescued 10 employees from the Russian Safinat company as rebels attacked the oil refinery they were constructing north of Bentiu, including Russian, Ukranian and Kenyan citizens.

Five were wounded in the fighting.

The fighting is between soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir against mutinous troops who sided with Machar, sacked as vicepresident in 2013.

The conflict has also taken on an ethnic dimension, pitting Kiir’s Dinka tribe against militia forces from Machar’s Nuer people.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF has warned that the conflict has triggered a serious risk of famine that will kill up to 50,000 children within months if immediate action is not taken.

Over 3.7 million people are in dire need of food aid, many of them being forced to eat “famine foods” such as grasses and leaves, UNICEF said, which flew in Thursday its fourth cargo airplane loaded with special therapeutic food for malnourished children.

“Worse is yet to come,” UNICEF chief in South Sudan Jonathan Veitch said in a statement Thursday.

“If conflict continues, and farmers miss the planting season, we will see child malnutrition on a scale never before experienced here.”

BEIRUT/THE HAGUE — Syria has submitted a “more specific” list of its chemical weapons to the global regulator overseeing the destruction of its stockpile after discrepancies were reported by inspectors on the ground, officials said.

Damascus agreed to give up its chemical arsenal after Washington threatened military action following the death of hundreds of Syrians in a sarin gas attack on the outskirts of Damascus during Syria’s civil war last August. But Damascus is several weeks behind schedule in handing over its lethal toxins.

A diplomat said questions had been raised by member states at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) about the details of its chemical arsenal submitted by President Bashar Assad’s government last year.

The officials said the original list had been based on estimates, not exact amounts of toxic agents found in storage and production facilities across Syria.

The joint UN/OPCW mission in Syria found “discrepancies between what they found, and what was on the original declaration”, one diplomat told Reuters.

OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan confirmed a revised list had been submitted. “For some of the stockpile, ranges of quantities had been provided. Now they are being replaced with specific amounts,” he said.

The exact amounts came to light after inspectors visited the sites, took inventory, and packaged the chemicals for transport to the port town of Latakia, he said. Official could not provide specific details about the discrepancies.

Syria initially reported to the OPCW having roughly 1,300 metric tonnes of toxic chemicals, including precursors for poison gas and nerve agents. Luhan said no new chemicals were added in the revised list.

As part of a deal reached with the United States and Russia last year, the Assad government agreed to abandon the weapons of mass destruction and destroy all chemicals in its possession by June 30.

Over 500 metric tonnes of toxins

Syria did not make public the exact list of chemicals, but officials have said it includes more than 500 metric tonnes of highly toxic chemical weapons, such as sulphur mustard and precursors for the poisonous gas sarin, as well as more than 700 metric tonnes of bulk industrial chemicals.

They are being loaded onto Norwegian and Danish ships in the Syrian port town of Latakia as part of a multimillion-dollar operation involving at least 10 countries.

The chemical weapons will be neutralised at sea on a specially-equipped US ship, the MV Cape Ray, while the bulk chemicals will be sent to commercial waste facilities in Finland, Britain and Germany.

But Syria has fallen several weeks behind schedule in handing over the chemicals, having shipped out nearly two-thirds of the stockpile for destruction abroad.

After missing several deadlines, Syria submitted a revised plan to the OPCW, saying it would hand everything over by April 27, or within 10 days.

An official at the OPCW, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a new list had been submitted, but said it was part of a routine reporting process.

“Sometimes information is not complete, or not in a format we require. It’s not extraordinary,” the official said. “But what they have submitted needs to be seen to come to any conclusions and I better not speculate about what’s in there.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A meeting between Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed after the killing of an Israeli in a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the session had been rescheduled for Thursday at the request of the United States. Washington is struggling to extend the talks, on the verge of collapse, beyond an April 29 deadline for a peace deal.

An Israeli official confirmed the meeting had been delayed but declined to say who asked for the postponement or when teams would reconvene to try to breathe new life into the US-driven peace process.

The killing on Monday of an off-duty police officer and the wounding of his wife in a shooting attack on their car in the West Bank as they drove to a Passover holiday dinner struck an emotional chord in Israel.

It drew calls from members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet to postpone the peace talks, at least until after 47-year-old Baruch Mizrahi’s funeral on Wednesday.

There was no claim of responsibility for the shooting. But in a statement on Tuesday, Netanyahu said the Palestinian Authority was to blame for anti-Israeli incitement that he alleged led to the attack, and he complained that President Mahmoud Abbas had not issued a condemnation.

At a meeting in his West Bank office with a group of Israeli lawmakers on Wednesday, Abbas “condemned violence and the killing of Palestinians and Israelis”, said Mohammed Al Madani, a member of the Central Committee of Abbas’ Fateh Party.

The event was scheduled before Monday’s attack. Abbas has held several meetings in the past with Israeli legislators, mainly members of the opposition in parliament.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Abbas, told a news conference with the head of the Israeli delegation: “We are against violence and against a return to violence.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry revived the peace talks in July after a nearly three-year hiatus with the aim of ending a decades-old conflict and establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced 119 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood of former president Mohamed Morsi to three years each in prison on Wednesday in connection with protests last October against his overthrow, judicial sources said.

More than 50 people were killed in the October 6 protests called by Morsi’s supporters, one of the bloodiest days since his overthrow by the military on July 3. Judge Hazem Hashad acquitted six people in the case. They faced charges including unlawful assembly and thuggery.

The army-backed authorities have banned the Muslim Brotherhood and driven it underground, killing hundreds of its supporters and arresting thousands in the weeks after Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, was toppled by the military following mass protests against his rule.

Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the general who ousted Morsi, declared last month that he would run in a presidential election that he is expected to win easily.

In another case last month, a court in southern Egypt sentenced 529 Morsi supporters to death in a ruling that drew criticism from rights groups and Western governments.

The Muslim Brotherhood was Egypt’s best organised political party until last year but the government has accused it of turning to violence since Morsi was overthrown. The Brotherhood says the group remains committed to peacefully resisting what it views as a military coup.

Many of the Brotherhood’s leaders, including Morsi, are on trial. Morsi is charged with crimes including conspiring with foreign militant groups against Egypt, which carries the death penalty.

In a separate case, a judge sentenced a prominent Islamist preacher and politician to seven years in jail on charges of forging his mother’s citizenship documents so he could contest the 2012 presidential election won by Morsi.

Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a hardline Salafist Islamist, was arrested after Morsi’s downfall. He was disqualified from the election when it emerged his mother held US citizenship — dual nationality that meant he could not run.

Abu Ismail was sentenced to an additional one year in prison on Saturday for insulting the court.

MUSCAT — Oman said it would extend curbs on the hiring of foreign workers in construction and housekeeping as part of efforts to save more jobs for local citizens and limit outflows of money from the economy.

Hiring of expatriates by private companies in those two sectors will be banned for six months from May 4, the official Oman News Agency (ONA) quoted Minister of Manpower Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Bakri as saying on Monday.

The ban was originally introduced for a six-month period last November. Similar restrictions exist for several other industries such as carpentry and aluminium product making.

It is not clear how much of an impact the ban will have; exceptions to the policy will be made for companies working on government projects, smaller enterprises and firms managed full-time by their owners, ONA reported.

Oman is spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects to diversify its economy beyond oil, and it seems unlikely to starve these projects of labour. Many Omani families employ domestic workers from abroad.

But Sheikh Abdullah’s order suggests growing concern in the government about the economy’s dependence on foreign workers — a concern shared by some other Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, which is deporting tens of thousands of illegal workers.

Expatriate workers in Oman rose to 1.53 million in February from 1.47 million registered a year earlier, government data shows. By contrast there were just 184,485 Omani citizens working in the private sector in February; the country’s total population, including foreign residents, is officially estimated at 4 million.

The government does not release regular, timely data on unemployment among its citizens, but discontent with limited job opportunities and corruption triggered sporadic street protests in 2011.

In February last year, the Council of Ministers said the government would aim to limit foreign workers to 33 per cent of Oman’s population, but it did not give a time frame and the rise in employment of expatriates since then suggests officials have found it hard to curb numbers in a growing economy.

Most foreign workers in the construction and oil industries come from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, while many domestic workers are from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Salim Al Sheedi, head of the Oman Society of Contractors, a construction industry association, said the ban would benefit well-established companies in the sector by preventing other firms from bringing in workers without properly supervising them.

By excluding smaller companies from the ban, the policy will also benefit Omani entrepreneurs and managers, he added.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — A Saudi man has died of MERS in the western city of Jeddah, where authorities have sought to calm fears over the spreading respiratory illness, the health ministry said Wednesday.

The ministry said five more people were infected with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), including two medics, all in Jeddah.

The latest death of a 52-year-old brings to 71 the total number of people to have died from MERS, out of 205 infections in Saudi Arabia, it added.

Health authorities on Tuesday reported the death of a 59-year-old, also in Jeddah, as well as four other infections in the same city, including three medics.

Last week panic over the spread of MERS among medical staff in Jeddah forced the temporary closure of an emergency room at a major hospital, prompting Health Minister Abdullah Al Rabiah to visit the facility in a bid to calm the public.

“The situation concerning the coronavirus is reassuring,” said a government statement.

Local media reported Wednesday at least four doctors at Jeddah’s King Fahd Hospital resigned this week after refusing to treat patients affected by MERS, apparently out of fear of catching the virus.

The MERS virus was initially concentrated in the eastern region of Saudi Arabia but has now spread across other areas.

The World Health Organisation said Friday it had been told of 212 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS infection worldwide, of which 88 have proved fatal.

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

Experts are still struggling to understand MERS, for which there is no known vaccine.

A recent study said the virus has been “extraordinarily common” in camels for at least 20 years, and may have been passed directly from the animals to humans.