Region

BAGHDAD — Gunmen attacked Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Saleh Al Mutlak's convoy in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad on Friday, killing a guard and wounding at least five, officials said.

The attack on one of the country's most senior Sunni Arab politicians comes less than three weeks before a contentious parliamentary election, the first since American troops left, which will be a major test for security forces.

"Mr Mutlak is safe and was not hurt," an assistant to the deputy premier, who was travelling in the convoy, told AFP.

The identity of the attackers was not immediately clear.

While an interior ministry official said only that gunmen attacked the convoy, Mutlak’s assistant specifically blamed the army.

“We were the target of an assassination attempt by the army who opened fire on us, and the bodyguards responded in the same way,” the assistant said, without elaborating.

There is widespread anger among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, which complains of being marginalised and mistreated by the Shiite-led government and security forces.

The attack comes ahead of an April 30 general election, which Mutlak’s list is contesting.

UN Iraq envoy Nickolay Mladenov has warned that campaigning for the election “will be highly divisive”.

“Everyone is ratcheting it up to the maximum, and you could see this even before officially the campaign started,” Mladenov told AFP.

“I would hope that it would be more about issues, and how the country deals with its challenges, but at this point it’s a lot about personality attacks,” he said.

Political analyst and parliamentary candidate Tareq Al Maamuri has said that “violence will increase during the election campaign, as well as the settling of accounts”.

“Since the beginning of the political process in Iraq, the electoral competition [has been] a dishonest competition,” he said.

The election will be held against the backdrop of rampant violence that kills hundreds of people each month, a long-deadlocked legislature and severely lacking basic services.

While security forces were able to keep violence to a minimum during last year’s provincial polls, they have failed to bring a subsequent year-long surge in unrest under control.

Shelling in the city of Fallujah, just a short drive from Baghdad, killed three children and wounded three others on Friday, a doctor and a tribal leader said.

In a sign of both the reach of anti-government militants and the weakness of security forces, all of Fallujah and shifting parts of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi, to its west, have been out of government control since early January.

CAIRO — In a courthouse near Cairo, a peremptory message hangs above the judge presiding over one of a series of trials involving Egypt's briefly powerful and now almost impotent Muslim Brotherhood.

"In the name of God the Merciful", it reads, "Allah commands you to render trust to whom it is due, and when you judge between people to judge with justice".

The chaotic scenes in the court do not appear to measure up.

A metal cage held 33 members of the Brotherhood — outlawed as a terrorist organisation after the army last July deposed Mohamed Morsi, the elected president who ruled in the Brotherhood's name for one tumultuous year.

Among them was Mohamed Badie, supreme guide of the Brotherhood. It is the most influential mainstream Islamist organisation in the world and its confrontation with the army-backed authorities in Cairo has created a country more divided than at any time since the group was founded in Egypt in 1928.

Dressed in white robes and facing a string of charges, some of which carry the death penalty, the Brothers kept up a barrage of chants, from Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest) to "Down, down with military rule".

The judge, heavily moustached and wearing black sunglasses, looked bored as he scornfully dismissed pleas from lawyers asking for more respectful treatment of their clients.

The judge brusquely ordered defendants and lawyers to be shut up. Scuffles broke out. A phalanx of policemen separated the caged Brothers from lawyers and journalists.

Badie then rose to proclaim that "the people will not accept an army tyrant", referring to Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the general who carried out last July's coup after mass protests against the divisive Morsi and who recently resigned from the military to contest a presidential election on May 26-27.

Before the curtain came down on this judicial mayhem, the Brotherhood's spiritual leader forecast the inevitable demise of Sisi, despite forecasts that he will win next month's election.

Reminiscent of Mubarak era

It was thought scenes like this had been brought to an end when president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in the 2011 Tahrir Square revolt. But now history seems to be repeating itself, with the army bent on eradicating the Islamists militarily.

Mubarak’s army-backed dictatorship, the continuation of a police state established by Gamal Abdel Nasser with the ousting of the monarchy in 1952, had faced down an Islamist insurgency that targeted him, his ministers and tourists in the 1990s.

In 30 years of Mubarak rule, military tribunals with scant respect for civil law sentenced 90 Islamists to death, of whom 68 were executed. In nine months of Sisi’s army-led government, courts have condemned 529 Islamists to death.

Nor was Egypt so polarised then as it is now. Over 1,000 Morsi supporters were shot dead after last July’s coup, and some 16,000 Brothers, and leaders of the secular youth movement that sparked the Tahrir revolt, have been rounded up and jailed.

Officials privately agree that Egypt needs not just the iron fist but a whole new outlook from its rulers, including an overhaul of the nation’s religious and political institutions.

The pent-up anger among the Tahrir Square youth, close watchers say, is likely to explode again if Sisi or his future government fail to create jobs in the Arab world’s most populous country of 85 million people.

“This country is known to turn on a sixpence very quickly. Sisi is now a total hero; he can be tomorrow’s villain. He knows that,” said a European diplomat. “I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.”

Sisi’s security establishment has already destroyed nearly all opposition, Islamist and secular. Besides the 529 Islamists sentenced to death, almost 1,000 more have been brought before the courts.

Defence lawyers say Egypt’s judiciary is handing down politically motivated sentences to wipe out the Brotherhood, which won a series of elections after the fall of Mubarak.

Distant dream?

The crackdown, the most brutal in Egypt’s modern history, is fuelling a violent Islamist insurgency across the country.

Since the coup, insurgent attacks have spread from the ungoverned badlands of the Sinai Peninsula into the cities, with a rash of attacks on police, security targets and judges.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a secular young software engineer and blogger at the heart of the 2011 Tahrir rebellion who is now being prosecuted for demonstrating against the new post-coup order, says Egypt is a dark place now.

“The country is more militarised now than under Mubarak [and] the scale of violence, repression, corruption and direct military control is unprecedented,” Fattah says. “We are already in a much worse position than during Mubarak’s time.”

“The hope that existed after the downfall of Mubarak has become a distant memory,” he said.

Warning that Sisi has to resolve huge problems that will not evaporate, he says “there is despair among a young generation; they are offering nothing. There is no future, no jobs for graduates and no way out”.

For now, Sisi enjoys the adulation of the majority of Egyptians, who see him as a saviour following three decades of Mubarak and three turbulent years since his demise. They appear to believe he is the man to improve their lot.

“People on the street tell me: Don’t talk to me about democracy, talk to me about bread and butter,” said Khaled Dawoud, an activist and spokesman for the liberal Dostour Party.

The economic pressures in Egypt, where millions endure poverty and unemployment, remain the most serious threat to its stability.

Growing insurgency

Sisi, politicians say, is aware of how dangerous the situation is but depends on his generals and army intelligence for information about the state of the country.

A youth boycott this year of a referendum on a new constitution drawn up by a panel named by the military-backed interim government sent shockwaves through the establishment.

There are fears that Sisi’s rise to power will provoke more Islamist protests and tempt him to use force to silence all dissent.

“When Sisi becomes president the Brotherhood won’t stop protesting, we won’t see any let-up in the crackdown, and as long as you have instability we won’t have economic recovery,” said Dawoud.

Former Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Bahaeddine, a moderate in the army-backed government, said Egypt’s future depends on rebuilding national consensus on issues such as a budget deficit estimated at 11 per cent of GDP, fuel subsidies that eat up one quarter of the budget, and addressing acute poverty while maintaining growth.

“Egypt totally collapsed. If you don’t have a national approach you cannot do anything,” he said.

Sisi has defended his crackdown, saying he has to eradicate terrorism, protect national interests and the economy, including the country’s industrial base, which has been hit by instability.

Egypt’s battle with the fundamentalists dates back 60 years. Presidents Nasser and Anwar Sadat tried to crush them but each time the crackdowns failed to eradicate political Islam.

The confrontation with the Brotherhood is particularly hard because of their wider popular base. The movement is embedded in society and spread across Egypt’s villages and towns.

Stuck in a time warp

The Egyptian authorities accuse them of fomenting a jihadi insurgency which appears to be gathering force since the coup, accusations the Brotherhood dismisses.

Ahead of next month’s polls, those who have worked with Sisi say he did not oust Morsi to advance his own presidential ambitions, but has found himself almost obliged to step forward at a critical juncture of Egypt’s history.

They describe him as pragmatic and driven by what he sees as the national interest of Egypt. He regards the army as the only reliable institution able to protect Egypt, take it through a divisive period and prevent a breakdown of the whole system.

That is why, they argue, he has taken control of billions of dollars in aid from the Gulf rushed to Egypt after the coup, and intends to supervise what Cairo hopes will be a further wave of investment from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“I don’t believe Sisi had a plan from the outset to push them out of power and take over. It was a progression of events — there was a political crisis and millions went to the streets — in which the army felt it had no choice,” the European diplomat said.

Looking forward, there is a consensus among diplomats extending even to some officials, that the military solution will not solve the problem and is making a bad situation worse.

But the Brotherhood is determined to present itself as a victim stripped of legitimate power rather than a movement that can learn from its mistakes and negotiate a return to mainstream politics.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is stubborn and fossilised. It needs to change and move on to a new policy. It is still where it was before July. It is stuck in a bunker,” the European diplomat said.

Yet many Egyptians have no faith in the army either.

“We tried the military for 60 years and where did we get to? We got corruption, no proper healthcare or education, no real political power or parties. This was the achievement of Mubarak so why do you want to repeat that again?” said Dawoud.

BEIRUT — Syrian government media and rebel forces said Saturday that poison gas had been used in a central village, injuring scores of people, while blaming each other for the attack.

The main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), said the poison gas attack Friday hurt dozens of people in the village of Kfar Zeita in the central province of Hama. It did not say what type of gas was used.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that people suffered from suffocation and breathing problems after the attack, apparently conducted during air raids that left heavy smoke over the area. It gave no further details.

State-run Syrian television blamed members of Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front for using chlorine gas at Kfar Zeita, killing two people and injuring more than 100.

The TV report claimed the Nusra Front is preparing for another chemical attack against the Wadi Deif area in the northern province of Idlib, as well as another area in Hama. It did not explain how it knew the Nusra Front's plans.

Activists in the village could not be reached Saturday.

An activist from Hama who is currently in Turkey and is in contact with activists and residents told The Associated Press that the attack occurred around sunset Friday. The man, who goes with the name Amir Al Basha, said the air raids on the rebel-held village came as nearby areas including Morek and Khan Sheikhoun have been witnessing intense clashes between troops and opposition fighters.

An amateur video posted online by opposition activists showed a hospital room in Kfar Zeita that was packed with men and children, some of whom breathing through oxygen masks. On one bed, the video showed six children on a bed, some appearing to have difficulty breathing while others cried.

The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the attack.

Chemical weapons have been used before in Syria’s three-year-old conflict. In August, a chemical attack near the capital, Damascus, killed hundreds of people. The US and its allies blamed the Syrian government for that attack, which nearly sparked Western air strikes against President Bashar Assad’s forces. Damascus denied the charges and blamed rebels of staging the incident.

The SNC called on the United Nations to conduct a “quick investigation into the developments related to the use of poisonous gas against civilians in Syria”. The coalition claimed that another chemical weapons attack Friday struck the Damascus suburb
of Harasta, though
state media did not report on it.

An international coalition aims to remove and destroy 1,300 metric tonnes of chemicals held by the Assad government by June 30 in the wake of the August attack. Syria’s government missed a December 31 deadline to remove the most dangerous chemicals in its stockpile and a February 5 deadline to give up its entire stockpile of chemical weapons. Assad’s government cited security concerns and the lack of some equipment but has repeated that it remains fully committed to the process.

In the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest and one-time commercial centre, the Observatory and state television reported intense clashes Saturday, mostly near a main intelligence office in the city’s contested neighbourhood of Zahra.

Syrian state news agency SANA reported earlier Saturday that several mortar shells hit the government-held neighbourhoods of Hamidiyeh and Khaldiyeh, killing at least six people and
wounding 15.

Aleppo became a key front in the country’s civil war after rebels launched an offensive there in July 2012.

CAIRO — Egyptian troops on Friday killed a prominent militant in the restive Sinai Peninsula where Islamist fighters have increasingly targeted security forces since last year’s ouster of president Mohamed Morsi.

Nour Al Hamdeen was “one of the most prominent and dangerous extremists”, military spokesman Colonel Ahmed Ali said in a statement.

Hamdeen was ambushed by troops on a road to Al Tuma village in the northern Sinai, and was killed in the ensuing firefight.

The army has poured troops into the mountainous and underdeveloped Sinai bordering the Palestinian Gaza Strip and Israel, to combat growing militancy.

Most attacks in the northern Sinai have targeted soldiers and policemen, but militants have also expanded their reach to the Nile Delta and Cairo.

Ansar Beit Al Maqdis, an Al Qaeda-inspired group, has claimed some of the deadliest attacks in Egypt since the army removed Morsi last July 3.

In its latest video released on jihadist forums, Ansar Beit Al Maqdis aired footage of a suicide bomber carrying out a December attack on police headquarters in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura, which killed 15 people.

The video named the bomber as Imam Maraie Imam Mahfouz or Abu Mariam, and said he was previously wounded in pro-Morsi demonstrations near Cairo’s Ramses Square, the site of deadly clashes between pro-Morsi protesters and security forces last year.

The video shows the bomber, wearing a white robe, lashing out at the military before driving a vehicle and carrying out the late-night attack.

Ansar Beit Al Maqdis claimed the bombing, but the military-installed authorities blamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood for it instead.

After the Mansoura bombing — which the Brotherhood had condemned — the authorities designated it as a “terrorist group”.

BEIRUT — For 22 years, Mary Mansourati has been waiting for her son, Dani, to come home. His shirts are ironed and hanging in his closet. His trousers, neatly folded, are stacked on the shelves next to his bed in the family’s Beirut apartment.

Dani was 30 when he was detained by Syrian intelligence and has not been heard from since. He is among an estimated 17,000 Lebanese still missing from Lebanon’s civil war or the years of Syrian domination that followed.

The war in Syria has added new urgency to the plight of their families. Hundreds of Lebanese were detained by the Syrians, and their relatives are convinced they are still alive. Now they fear they will be lost in Syria’s labyrinth of overcrowded jails and detention facilities or be killed in the ongoing mayhem.

The war in Syria has also added a new generation of names to the already long rolls of the missing. There are no exact figures, but human rights organisations say tens of thousands of Syrians have vanished in the three years since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began.

Elsewhere in the region, nearly 70,000 Iraqis are still missing from three wars over the past three decades, including sectarian bloodletting that was unleashed by the 2003 US-led invasion, according to government figures.

There’s never been any truth or reconciliation process that might uncover the fates of these missing. In both Lebanon and Iraq, few efforts have been made to examine what happened during the countries’ wars, mainly because many of those involved in killings and kidnappings have become politicians, some even serving in government.

The 82-year-old Mansourati believes her son is alive in a Syrian prison, despite having no concrete evidence or word that anyone has seen him. A fighter with an anti-Syrian Christian militia, he was arrested in 1992, two years after the civil war ended.

“We need our sons back,” she told The Associated Press in an interview at her home in east Beirut, where she cares for her gravely ill husband.

Friday marked the ninth anniversary of a permanent protest tent Mansourati and other families of the missing have erected in downtown Beirut. Every day, relatives sit at the tent, sometimes spending the night. Photos of the missing and slogans calling on Assad to explain their fate line the sides of the tent.

“We are tired of going back and forth to the tent. We are getting old,” Mansourati said.

Like many relatives of the missing, she believes Lebanese officials, some of whom led militias during the civil war and fought on behest of the Syrians, are complicit in covering up their loved ones’ fates.

Rights groups speak of a “conspiracy of silence”, with officials withholding information out of concern they could be implicated in wartime atrocities.

The Taif Accord ended the war in 1990 by enshrining a sectarian-based political system that leaves all major decisions in the hands of a small group of people, many of whom gained political power by commanding a powerful militia during the conflict.

There has been no serious state-led documentation that would produce an official record with the numbers of dead, injured, missing and forcibly displaced. Lebanon went into “collective amnesia” after the war, the International Centre for Transitional Justice said in a recent report documenting the country’s failure to examine and deal with its complex past.

A year after the Lebanese civil war ended, the government declared there were no detainees being held by rival militias. Four years later, in 1995, the government passed a law declaring any person missing for more than four years legally dead, advising families looking for their vanished loved ones to move on.

Most of the thousands missing likely are dead. They disappeared after being kidnapped by rival Lebanese militias during the war, which saw multiple sectarian massacres, and there’s little chance any Lebanese faction could keep someone secretly detained for nearly a quarter century. Still, even uncovering suspected locations of mass graves where the missing might be is considered too politically explosive.

When the families persisted in demanding the truth, the government said it couldn’t help because digging too deep into the past could inflame old hostilities and unleash another war.

“The official discourse was, if peace is to prevail we need to forget the past and move on into the future,” said Lebanese lawyer Nizar Saghieh, who has represented hundreds of families seeking to discover the fate of their missing relatives.

But the families of those who disappeared after being detained by Syria are far less convinced by the government’s death declaration. Rights groups estimate they number between 300 and 600 Lebanese.

Majida Hassan Bashasha’s brother, Ahmed, was picked up by Syrian troops at a checkpoint near Beirut in 1976, the year Syrian forces entered Lebanon to help quell the sectarian fighting. Ahmed was 18 when he vanished, and his sister says he was not a militant.

Like Mary Mansourati, 59-year-old Bashasha believes her brother is alive, languishing in a Syrian prison. She has been campaigning relentlessly to bring him home, attending annual rallies of the families of the disappeared in front of the local UN headquarters in Beirut. A few years ago, several former detainees came to the protest tent and recognised her brother from a picture she was holding. They said they shared a cell with him in a Damascus prison.

“I am his big sister and my heart tells me he is still alive,” Bashasha said, holding a black-and-white photo of a young man she said was Ahmed.

Initially, when the conflict started in Syria she feared that her brother and other Lebanese detainees would be forgotten. But now, as she watches Assad’s agents fill Syria’s prisons with a new generation of government opponents, she holds out some hope that any Lebanese being held in Syria will be released.

“They don’t need them in prison anymore,” Bashasha said.

BEIRUT — The commandos infiltrated Syrian rebel-held territory near the Lebanese border, watching rebel fighters come and go from a two-storey villa before slipping inside to plant a powerful bomb. The next morning, they detonated it as three rebel explosive experts and four assistants met inside, turning the villa to rubble in seconds.

The operation late last month in Syria’s western Qalamoun region was carried out by fighters from Lebanon’s Hizbollah group, several Lebanese officials close to the fighters have told The Associated Press. The Shiite group has sent hundreds of its fighters into Syria to shore up President Bashar Assad’s overstretched troops, helping them gain ground around the capital, Damascus, and near the Lebanese border.

But with its own casualties mounting in a civil war that activists say has killed more than 150,000 people in three years, officials say Hizbollah has turned to a variety of new tactics — including complicated commando operations — to hunt down rebels and opposition commanders.

The aim of the new strategy, that includes hit-and-run attacks as well as reconnaissance missions, is to help Assad hold onto power, limit Hizbollah casualties and attack groups that want to launch attacks inside Lebanon itself.

“Hizbollah is also well aware of its comparatively limited manpower capacity,” said Charles Lister, an analyst with the Brookings Doha Centre. “So exploiting an ability to inflict damage on the enemy without expending significant resources... is a natural strategic development.”

Hizbollah has a long history of guerrilla attacks. It fought Israel in the wake of its occupation of south Lebanon until it pulled out in 2000, relying on hit-and-run assaults to combat Israel’s army.

In Syria, the turning point in Hizbollah’s strategy came after the group helped secure the Syrian border town of Qusair last June, said the Lebanese officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Hizbollah military tactics. After that battle, they say rebels ambushed and killed four elite Hizbollah fighters after Syrian troops told them the area was secure.

Now, Hizbollah sends small groups of fighters to observe areas before entering, the officials say. One official said Hizbollah also has linked Syrian territories where it is present to its bases in Lebanon via a secure, hard-wired telecommunication network it has been using back home for years. The fighters avoid using mobile phones or other equipment easy to monitor, the official said.

The attack on the villa in Qalamoun also showcases the turn to commando-style fighting. Syrian state media said Syrian troops carried out the attack. However, Lebanese daily newspaper Al Akhbar that is sympathetic to Assad, said both Syrian troops and Hizbollah special forces carried out the attack.

Observers of the group and experts say the Qalamoun attack was consistent with similar operations carried out by Hizbollah in the past.

“Covert and targeted Hizbollah operations further into Syria’s interior or into ‘enemy territory’ is not such a surprising development,” Lister said. “After all, Hizbollah training incorporates all the capabilities necessary for such operations, and there is a precedent for similar tactical evolutions, particularly against Israel.”

Lister added that the attack “opens its forces up to being able to expand their operational capacity to include covert qualitative attacks on enemy infrastructure and senior leadership”.

An opposition activist in Qalamoun who uses the name Amer Al Qalamouni told the AP that the three men, part of an engineering unit, were killed while preparing a bomb and did not die in an operation carried out by Syrian troops or Hizbollah.

“Had the bomb been detonated by the army or Hizbollah we would have said that but they did not,” Qalamouni said by telephone from Syria. “They [Hizbollah and army] want to take credit that they killed them.” He did not elaborate.

A spokesman for largely secretive Hizbollah declined to comment when asked if its commandos carried out the Qalamoun attack, saying he had no information about it. The group’s television station Al Manar, however, hailed the “qualitative operation” and aired black-and-white photographs of the villa before and after the attack.

Al Manar said the operation was carried 11 kilometres deep inside rebel territories near the area of Hawsh Arab.

The station also reported that the three bomb experts killed were behind suicide attacks that targeted Lebanon. That also offers further motivation for Hizbollah to carry out such an attack. Syrian rebel groups and those supporting them increasingly carry out suicide attacks and other assaults in Shiite neighbourhoods in Lebanon as revenge for Hizbollah’s support of Assad. Dozens have been killed in recent months, the bulk of whom are usually civilians.

Lebanon itself remains deeply split over Syria’s increasingly sectarian civil war. Assad comes from a Shiite offshoot sect and the rebels fighting him are dominated by Sunnis. Stopping the attacks in Lebanon could ease those tensions and help Hizbollah’s own image at home.

Meanwhile, Syrian troops continue to reap the benefits of Hizbollah’s experience.

“Since the crisis started until now there has been major development in the performance of Syrian forces,” said Qassim Qassir, a Hizbollah expert who writes for the Lebanese daily newspaper As Safir.

One of the deadliest operations against rebels in Syria occurred in February when forces loyal to Assad killed 175 rebels, many of them Al Qaeda-linked fighters, in an ambush near Damascus. The attack — filmed and broadcast exclusively by Al Manar — was described as one of the deadliest attacks by government forces against fighters near the capital since the crisis began in March 2011. Many believe Hizbollah orchestrated the assault because of Al Manar having access and due to the fact the group’s fighters are active in the region.

The Lebanese officials close to Hizbollah said the group’s fighters spearhead operations near the Lebanon border, where they pound areas with artillery, multiple rocket launchers and mortars before storming it. Once they get an area under control, they hand it over to Syrian troops or pro-government Syrian militiamen known as the National Defence Forces.

“They don’t trust anyone,” an official said. “They were ambushed several times and lost a number of elite fighters.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel has demolished several European Union-funded humanitarian housing shelters in a highly sensitive strip of West Bank land near Jerusalem, an EU official said Friday.

“On April 9, three of some 18 residential structures were demolished... in Jabal Al Baba,” an area outside the sprawling settlement of Maale Adumim, a spokesman for the EU’s delegation to the Palestinian territories told AFP.

The tin huts, used to house Palestinians made homeless by severe winter weather at the beginning of the year, were “partially funded by EU member states”, the official said.

Israel issued demolition orders on all 18 structures in February, the official said, and EU delegates “raised this with the Israeli authorities” both at that time of and after the demolitions.

The EU official said simply that there were ongoing discussions with Israeli authorities over the demolitions, but a report by EurActiv, a Brussels-based news service, said diplomats were demanding financial compensation.

“We should ask for compensation from Israel whenever EU-funded humanitarian aid projects are destroyed,” EurActiv quoted an anonymous diplomat as saying.

Israel’s military administration of the occupied Palestinian territories could not immediately comment on the demolitions.

The structures were located in E1, a highly contentious area in the West Bank, east of Jerusalem.

Israel has been planning construction in E1 since the early 1990s but nothing has ever been built there due to heavy international pressure. Plans for building 1,200 units unveiled in December 2012 were quickly put on the back burner after the announcement triggered a major diplomatic backlash.

The Palestinians say construction in E1 would effectively cut the West Bank in two and prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The Palestinian Authority has signed up formally to the Geneva Conventions, which set down the rules of warfare and humanitarian operations in conflict zones, the treaties’ guardian Switzerland confirmed Friday, according to Agence France-Presse.

Swiss foreign ministry spokesman Pierre-Alain Eltschinger told AFP that the Palestinian Authority had declared itself party to the conventions on April 2.

This was registered formally by Switzerland on Thursday, he added.

The step is part of a new diplomatic drive by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, coming as peace talks with Israel are close to collapse.

Abbas said he had received a letter from the Swiss president confirming the registration, and praised it as “an historic day for the Palestinian people”, a senior Palestinian official said.

The Palestinians had pledged to freeze all moves to seek membership in UN organisations and international conventions — a stepping stone to recognition of their hoped-for state — during the talks in return for Israel’s release of veteran Arab prisoners.

Israel has, meanwhile, made a new bid to expand settlements in annexed Arab East Jerusalem.

The original Geneva Conventions were crafted in the 19th century under the auspices of the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross, and recast after World War II.

Over the subsequent decades, optional protocols were added to take into account the developing realities of war and its impact on civilians.

The Palestinians have also submitted requests to the United Nations to join 13 other international conventions and treaties, and the world body said Thursday that the move was legal.

The treaties include the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, the convention on the rights of the child, the convention against torture and an anti-corruption accord.

‘Piracy’

Meanwhile, the Palestinian negotiator in Mideast peace talks is calling Israel’s decision to stop tax money transfers “piracy”, The Associated Press reported.

Saeb Erekat said Friday that “the Israeli decision to withhold these funds is piracy. ... It cannot be maintained.” He also said talks persist, though “gaps remain big”.

Erekat spoke a day after an Israeli official said Israel would stop the tax money transfers in retaliation for the Palestinians pushing to sign up for more recognition from international agencies and treaties. That comes after Israel failed to release Palestinian prisoners as promised and moved forward with more settlements in land Palestinians want for their future capital.

Israel collects about $100 million a month in taxes for the Palestinians. US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the Israeli move “unfortunate” on Friday.

BENGHAZI — The Libyan army said it had taken control Wednesday of two oil ports under a weekend deal to end a crippling nine-month blockade by rebels seeking autonomy in the country’s east.

Colonel Ali Al Shikhi, spokesman for the army general staff, said men under its command had taken control of Al Hariga and Zueitina ports.

The rebels’ seizure of four eastern oil terminals last July in pursuit of their campaign for restored autonomy for the eastern Cyrenaica region slashed exports from 1.5 million barrels per day to just 250,000 bpd.

Tripoli says the blockade has cost the country more than $14 billion (10.1 billion euros) in lost revenues.

A port official said exports could resume from Al Hariga as early as Sunday if the National Oil Co (NOC) gives the necessary approvals, restoring a much-needed revenue stream for the weak central government following the 2011 overthrow of Moamer Kadhafi.

Under the deal reached on Sunday, the rebels were to hand over the two terminals this week and cede the other two within two to four weeks, provided negotiations are successfully concluded.

The two ports have a combined export capacity of 210,000 bpd.

“Ibrahim Jodhran’s group undertook not to re-enter the Port of Al Hariga or resume its blockade,” Shikhi said, referring to the rebel leader.

“Operations at the port should resume at the start of next week [Sunday], provided force majeure is lifted,” Al Hariga port official Abdelwahab Salem Omran said.

The NOC declared force majeure at the four terminals last August, effectively bringing all authorised oil shipments to a halt.

The lifting of the rebel blockade of Ras Lanouf and Al Sidra would be an even bigger prize. Together they have a capacity of 550,000 bpd.

Western governments issued a joint statement Monday calling for a rapid reopening of the oil terminals.

They called for “the prompt establishment of a transparent and inclusive national dialogue that includes particular focus on the fundamental national and regional questions involving Libya’s resources”.

Details of Sunday’s agreement have been kept under wraps but the rebels have been demanding a referendum on restoring the autonomy that the Cyrenaica region enjoyed for the first 12 years after Libyan independence in 1951.

They have also sought full back-pay for their men, who were employed as security guards at the oil terminals before launching their blockade.

The eastern terminals were a key battleground in the NATO-backed uprising that saw Kadhafi toppled and killed in 2011.

A Western diplomat said the rebels were “trying to find a way out of the crisis they created” with an abortive oil export bid on a rogue tanker last month.

The US Navy intercepted the tanker and returned it to Libya, and the UN Security Council passed a resolution banning all unauthorised Libyan oil exports.

CAIRO — Egyptian prosecutors presented their first evidence Thursday to back up charges that three journalists from the Al Jazeera satellite news network and their co-defendants participated in terrorism, playing to the court an assortment of videos found in their possession. They included news clips about an animal hospital with donkeys and horses, and another about Christian life in Egypt.

Defence lawyers — and even the judge — dismissed the videos as irrelevant, while defendants shouted from the dock that the trial was “a complete joke” and “an embarrassment to Egypt”.

The three journalists, award-winning Australian correspondent Peter Greste, Canadian-Egyptian acting bureau chief Mohammed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohammed, are accused of being part of a terrorist group and airing falsified footage intended to damage Egyptian national security. Egyptian authorities accuse Qatari-owned Al Jazeera of providing a platform for the Muslim Brotherhood, which the government has branded a terrorist organisation.

Al Jazeera denies the claim, and the defendants deny being members of the Brotherhood, saying they were simply doing their job reporting on Egypt’s political turmoil.

The case is part an unprecedented crackdown on the Brotherhood since the military’s ouster in July of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, who was a veteran figure from the group. Hundreds of Morsi supporters have been killed in crackdowns on protests and more than 16,000 have been arrested. The three journalists, who work for Al Jazeera’s English-language channel, were arrested December 29 when police raided a Cairo hotel room they were using as an office.

“This is a politicised trial and a politicised judge,” Fahmy shouted from the courtroom cage where defendants are traditionally held during trials. He said prosecutors had told him privately that he and his co-defendants “are paying the price” for tensions between Egypt and Qatar.

“I want to get out of this place! ... I am going to expose all of this!” he shouted. “There are crimes against humanity taking place. Nothing is right in this system.”

Besides the three journalists, 17 others are charged in the case, mostly students not connected to Al Jazeera. Only five of the students are present for the trial, with the rest on trial in absentia.

In previous sessions, prosecutors have said they would present video from the defendants showing they intended to harm national security. The prosecution has said it will present further video evidence including Al Jazeera coverage of the crackdown on Islamists that it claims was falsified to destabilise Egypt and fuel support of the Brotherhood by showing Egypt as thrown into “civil war”.

Thursday’s was the first session in which any video was shown — but none of it appeared to have any connection to terrorism, and none was Al Jazeera footage. Prosecutors said the material was found on the journalists’ or students’ flash drives and computers.

The videos included clips from Greste’s BBC news documentary on Somalia called “Land of Bandits”, for which he won a 2011 Peabody Award and clips from a Kenya press conference. Before joining Al Jazeera, Greste worked for the BBC in London, Bosnia, Kenya and South Africa.

Other footage, from the Sky News Arabia network, included short news reports on an animal hospital in southern Egypt with pictures of horses and donkeys and on a Christian mass in Egypt in 2012.

“This clearly does not contain anything supporting the case,” presiding judge Mohammed Nagi Shehata said after the footage was aired.

Khaled Abu Bakr, Fahmy’s lawyer, mocked the prosecutors, contending they didn’t even know the content of the footage before submitting it as evidence.

“The prosecutor clearly didn’t see the videos,” he said, reiterating his request to release the journalists on bail. “The world is watching.”

The judge refused bail and adjourned the trial to April 22.

The prosecution made no comment about the videos, though the defence lawyers said it is expected to present more videos in later sessions.

“This is a complete joke!” Greste shouted from behind the bars.

“This is a joke, ... it’s an embarrassment to Egypt,” Fahmy said.

Shortly after the court session started Thursday, one of the student defendants, Khaled Abdel-Raouf, collapsed in the cage after he complained to the judge that he has been in hunger strike because of bad treatment and lack of medical care and because the prison was barring his visitors. Dozens of defendants in several Brotherhood-related cases have gone on hunger strike over similar conditions.

Meanwhile, a bomb thrown under a police car in a busy square west of Cairo exploded Thursday night, wounding a police officer’s leg, Egypt’s Interior Ministry spokesman Hani Abdel-Latif said. Violence has spread across the country since Morsi ouster as the government intensifies its campaign against the Brotherhood and his supporters.