Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his ministers to limit all but diplomatic and security contact with their Palestinian counterparts, an official said Wednesday, dealing another blow to faltering peace talks.

The move comes a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry, who kick-started talks in July, blamed Israel for derailing the process by announcing new settlement homes in what he described as a “poof” moment in negotiations.

“In response to the Palestinian violation of their commitments under peace talks... Israel government ministers have been told to refrain from meeting their Palestinian counterparts,” the Israeli government official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

Palestinian Minister of Labour Ahmad Majdalani dismissed the significance of Israel’s tactic.

“In any case there are no [regular] meetings organised between Palestinian and Israeli ministers, apart from the finance ministers,” he told AFP.

“Ninety per cent of day-to-day dealings are done with the Israeli military administration” of the occupied West Bank, Majdalani added.

Kerry on Tuesday blamed Israel’s approval of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem on April 1 for the latest stalemate in the negotiations, a charge that has left Israeli officials bristling.

While he blamed intransigence on both sides, Kerry told US lawmakers that a delayed Israeli plan to release several Palestinian prisoners as part of a good faith effort was sabotaged by the settlements move.

“In the afternoon, when they were about to maybe get there, 700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem and, poof, that was sort of the moment,” he testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

At the end of March, Israel refused to release a final batch of long-serving Palestinian prisoners as agreed under the talks, and at the same time reissued tenders for 708 settler homes in annexed Arab East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians responded to the prisoner issue by applying for membership of 15 international treaties, breaking their own commitment to refrain from such action during the nine months of talks.

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have teetered on the brink of collapse, with Washington fighting an uphill battle to get the two sides to agree to a framework proposal to extend the negotiations beyond an April 29 deadline to the year’s end.

Kerry’s remarks were met with a crisp response from Israel’s Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, who heads the far-right Jewish Home Party.

“Israel will never apologise for building in Jerusalem,” Bennett said.

“I hear that the [building] programme in Jerusalem was defined as ‘poof’. For many years [the Palestinians] tried with explosions and bombs to stop us being in the eternal capital of the Jewish people, it will not happen.”

The State Department, perhaps assessing the potential impact Kerry’s comments could have in the Middle East, rushed to explain that the secretary of state was fairminded in apportioning blame.

“John Kerry was again crystal clear today that both sides have taken unhelpful steps and at no point has he engaged in a blame game,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Twitter.

“He even singled out by name Prime Minister Netanyahu for having made courageous decisions throughout process.”

Kerry was also drawn into a heated exchange with Senator John McCain, who declared the peace talks “finished”.

While Kerry insisted that Israelis and Palestinians were keen on continuing the process, McCain cut in: “It is stopped,” he told Kerry. “Recognise reality.”

Meanwhile, the two sides met US envoy Martin Indyk late on Monday and were to see him again on Wednesday, a Palestinian source told AFP.

It was unclear if the latest Israeli decision would affect that meeting.

JEDDAH — Saudi health authorities announced on Wednesday another death caused by the MERS virus in the capital Riyadh, bringing the nationwide toll to 67.

The 57-year-old Saudi national had been suffering from chronic illnesses, the health ministry said.

It also reported that another two Saudis had been infected by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — one a 51-year-old and the other a 90-year-old, both of whom are suffering chronic illnesses.

The latest figures bring to 179 the number of cases of MERS in Saudi Arabia since the virus first appeared in the kingdom in September 2012.

The virus was initially concentrated in the eastern region but has now spread across more areas.

Eleven new cases were reported in the western port city of Jeddah in recent weeks, causing a wave of panic fuelled by rumours circulated on social networks.

Of the 11 victims, two died while six have recovered and another three are undergoing treatment, according to the health ministry.

Three of the patients in Jeddah were health workers, including one of the two who died, prompting authorities to close the emergency department at the city’s King Fahd Hospital.

Patients were transferred to other hospitals while the department was disinfected in a process expected to take 24 hours, the ministry said on Tuesday.

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, nine percent of whom died.

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

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

The World Health Organisation said at the end of March that it had been told of 206 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS infection worldwide, of which 86 had been fatal.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — An army deserter attacked a military patrol in north Lebanon killing two soldiers and wounding another before turning the gun on himself, a security official said on Wednesday.

The attack late on Tuesday in the Akkar border region of Lebanon was carried out by Ali Taleb, a 30-year-old soldier who deserted from the army three years ago and has long been sought by the security forces, the official said.

Taleb, who had been described as anti-social and violent, launched the attack on the army patrol at around 9:30pm on Tuesday, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

After killing the two soldiers, one of them an officer, and wounding a third, Taleb shot himself dead with a pistol despite pleas by relatives to give himself up.

A young man who was with Taleb at the time has been arrested and an inquiry launched to determine the motive for the attack, the official said.

Many inhabitants of Akkar, a coastal plain near Lebanon’s border with Syria, are soldiers, and employment by the military is the main means of escaping the abject poverty of the region.

GENEVA — The head of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian Church suggested on Wednesday that Syrian refugees should be housed in camps inside Syria, reflecting growing frustration among Lebanese over the burden imposed on their country by their neighbours’ war.

The United Nations has registered one million refugees in Lebanon since the conflict began three years ago, the highest concentration of refugees worldwide. They are housed in homes and local communities rather than refugee camps.

Cardinal Beshara Al Rai, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, told a news conference in Geneva that the presence of so many Syrians represented a huge economic, social, political and security burden for Lebanon.

“Why not install some camps for them in Syrian territory where there is security? The area of Syria is 20 times greater than that of Lebanon,” he said.

“There is plenty of spare space in secure terrority or at least to facilitate the passage of humanitarian aid in no man’s land between the borders of Lebanon and Syria.”

Ordinary Lebanese had welcomed the Syrians but were now paying a price for doing so, he said.

“They take all the work from the Lebanese people and the Lebanese are chased out. It’s not possible.”

Rai did not elaborate on the suggestion of building camps in Syria or say exactly where they could be built.

Many refugees coming to Lebanon fled as Syrian forces and Hizbollah captured territory from rebels close to the border, making it unlikely they would risk returning to areas controlled by those same forces.

And while the refugee population has ballooned — not just in Lebanon but also Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, to a total of 2.65 million — even greater numbers are displaced within Syria.

The UN refugee agency estimates 6.5 million are displaced within the country, and many have been made homeless more than once, as an apparently safe shelter became caught up in new fighting.

Hundreds of thousands more have left Syria but not requested international assistance.

Many Syrians have requested asylum in rich countries, especially Sweden and Germany, but the numbers gaining asylum or being resettled for humanitarian reasons are a tiny fraction of the total.

Despite a huge humanitarian appeal and universal calls for an end to the violence, the UN has too little cash to feed Syrians in need and has begun cutting their rations.

DAMASCUS — Two car bombs exploded Wednesday in a government-held district of Syria’s battleground city of Homs, killing at least 25 people and wounding more than 100, state media said.

The blasts hit a commercial street inhabited mostly by members of President Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect in the central city, where government forces have been imposing a heavy siege on rebel-controlled districts.

Syria’s uprising, which began with largely peaceful protests against Assad’s rule in March 2011, has since evolved into a civil war with sectarian overtones, pitting predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels against an Assad government that is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Homs, a city of about one million, has shown great sympathy for the opposition since the early days of the uprising. The city was once known as “the capital of the Syrian revolution” before government forces captured large parts of once rebel-held neighbourhoods such as Baba Amr and Khaldiyeh.

State news agency SANA said one car blew up near a sweets shop in a busy street and about half an hour later another car exploded about 100 metres away “in order to inflict the biggest numbers of casualties among citizens”.

SANA said the wounded included its photographer in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, adding that the blasts went off in the Karm Al Loz neighbourhood. It said the explosion that struck a busy street also wounded 107 people.

It said the dead and wounded in the explosions included women and children.

Syrian TV showed several shops and cars on fire. Bloodied people could be seen being carried on stretchers into ambulances.

“As ambulances and fire engines were working in the first site, the second blast went off, increasing the number of casualties,” a witness in the city told The Associated Press. The man, who asked that his name not be given for fear of reprisals, said he counted eight bodies of people killed in the second blast.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blasts killed 21 people including children. It added that the number “is expected to rise” because some of the wounded are in critical conditions.

The observatory said the dead might have included some pro-government gunmen.

On March 27, a blast occurred in an Alawite neighbourhood in the city, killing and wounding dozens of people.

The blasts in Homs came hours after Syrian troops backed by Hizbollah fighters captured the last major town in the Qalamoun region near the border with Lebanon after weeks of intense fighting.

Syrian TV and Lebanon’s Hizbollah-owned Al Manar station said the town of Rankous fell earlier Wednesday, depriving the rebels their last major base in the rugged area.

President Bashar Assad’s forces backed by Hizbollah fighters have been on the offensive in the Qalamoun region since November when they captured most of the border area with Lebanon. The six-month battle forced tens of thousands of Syrians to flee to safety in Lebanon.

The capture of Rankous and other towns and villages has cut a major supply route for weapons and fighters into the country from eastern Lebanon.

Syrian TV aired live footage from inside Rankous on Wednesday saying that the operation to capture the town lasted 18 hours. Much of the homes appeared intact in the town’s center, overlooked by a mosque with a green dome atop a hill.

“Rankous returns to the nation and is under the control of the Syrian Arab Army,” a TV announcer said.

The observatory reported that troops and Hizbollah fighters are in full control of the town. It added that the fighting is continuing in a nearby area known as Rankous Farms.

Also Wednesday, the UN refugee agency said it had delivered aid to a rebel-held area of the war-shattered northern city of Aleppo in a “rare and risky” operation carried out in cooperation with the Syrian Red Crescent.

UNHCR said in a statement that the operation took place following an agreement with the Syrian government and the opposition to observe a brief ceasefire that was respected by both sides.

It said two trucks packed with blankets, plastic sheeting, hygiene kits and kitchen sets and food were delivered to the needy in the besieged neighbourhood of Bustan Al Qasr in eastern Aleppo.

UNHCR staff observed a “dire” humanitarian situation in the area, including acute shortage of food, water and medicine, the statement said. UNHCR last accessed the area in June 2013.

TEHRAN — A new computer game is available online in Iran that allows players to shoot opposition figures involved in the disputed 2009 presidential election, media reported Wednesday.

The free flash-based game resembles a shoddy knock-off of Doom, a popular horror-themed game in the 90s that pioneered first-person genre, and was produced by a local media company run by “youths faithful to the Islamic revolution”, according to its website.

The company says the game allows the player to “confront symbols of sedition” — a term coined in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential election to describe pro-reform supporters who disputed the poll’s result.

The player must shoot the targets — the heads of Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, two opposition leaders who have been kept incommunicado under house arrests since February 2011 — and reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami.

The game has drawn fire Iranian reformists and according to the media, the organisation tasked with issuing licences for video games produced in Iran is reporting it to the authorities.

“Its producers did not put forward any requests for a licence,” Hossein Moazami, an official at Iran’s computer and video games foundation, was quoted as saying by the Arman daily.

“Therefore, the relevant authorities at the culture ministry, police and the judiciary will be informed,” Moazami said without commenting on the game’s content.

The game is named “The Return of Mokhtar” and is to be found at:

http://www.honarenab.ir/Hadaya/Bazi/Bazgasht_Mokhtar.aspx

Nearly five years after the disputed election that sparked unprecedented street protests and highlighted cracks within Iran’s ruling elite remains a bone of contention between hardliners and reformists.

Iran’s self-declared moderate president, Hassan Rouhani who took office in August, had promised to resolve the issue.

His officials have expressed criticism of ongoing house arrests of Mousavi and Karroubi, who claimed the vote was rigged by Rouhani’s hardline predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

NAIROBI — The two UN workers shot dead in central Somalia were working on the links between money transfer systems and piracy, the UN anti-drugs and crime agency said Wednesday.

Former British police officer Simon Davis, 57, and his French colleague, 28-year-old researcher Clement Gorrissen, were fatally shot by a man in uniform just after their arrival at the airport in Galkayo on Monday.

“The two men, who often worked together, were on mission in Somalia to offer technical advice and to help build local capacities in the specialised field of illicit money flows,” the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said.

UNODC gave no details of the circumstances of the attack, nor on its motive, which remains unknown.

It said the two experts had been working to ensure that the remittance networks, which replace banks in Somalia, could be used by ordinary citizens but not by criminals. Many Somalis rely on remittance companies to receive money from relatives in the diaspora.

Davis served with the Metropolitan police force, specialising in tracking financial movements, before joining UNODC in 2012. He also worked closely with the British government in the area of fighting piracy.

In addition, Davis provided training to law enforcement officials in the Horn of Africa, UNODC said.

Gorrissen first worked for UNODC in 2010 as part of the Global Programme against Money Laundering, Proceeds of Crime and the Financing of Terrorism.

In May 2011, he researched illicit money flows for the Contact Group on Piracy. He was a key contributor to the highly regarded report “Pirate Trails: Tracking the Illicit Financial Flows from Pirate Activities off the Horn of Africa”.

No one has claimed the attack in Galkayo, a town that straddles the self-proclaimed autonomous regions of Galmudug and Puntland. Al Shabab Islamists, who have been influential in the area around Galkayo, expressed their satisfaction at the killings but denied being behind them.

Galkayo is not under the control of the central government in Mogadishu and is a stronghold of the networks of pirates who stage attacks off the coast of Somalia. Several foreigners have been kidnapped in and around the town in recent years.

The 2013 report on financial transfers and piracy estimated that ransom payments totalling between $339 million and $413 million (245 million and 300 million euros) were made to pirates between April 2005 and December 2012, with between 30 and 50 per cent of the total remaining in the hands of pirate chiefs.

TUNIS — Tunisia on Tuesday announced a new international fundraising campaign to reclaim the set where numerous Star Wars scenes were filmed from the encroaching desert.

The set for Mos Espa — hometown of Anakin Skywalker, the protagonist in the blockbuster film series who later becomes Darth Vader — was built at Ong Jmel in southern Tunisia in the 1990s for the filming of “Star Wars Episode One — The Phantom Menace.”

The tourism ministry has teamed up with several organisations to launch the “Save Mos Espa” campaign, aiming to raise 300,000 Tunisian dinars (137,000 euros) for the restoration of the site, which has been damaged by shifting sand dunes.

“Mos Epsa is located in a very windy region, threatened by sand dunes which the wind moves by around 15 metres a year. One dune has already buried 10 per cent of the site,” said Nabil Gasmi, from one of the tourism groups involved in the campaign.

“We managed to remove 8,000 cubic metres of sand in 12 days. Unfortunately some of the set has already collapsed,” he told reporters.

The Tunisian state has allocated 160,000 dinars to the project, with an appeal launched on Monday on a crowdfunding website (www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-mos-espa) to raise $45,000 (33,000 euros).

The ministry hopes to secure the rest of the money from sponsors and private donations.

Fahmi Houki, an official at the ministry, explained that the sand clearance was a temporary operation, because the dunes are constantly moving, and would save the set for another eight to 10 years.

The North African country’s vital tourism industry suffered from the violence and political instability that followed the 2011 uprising that toppled a decades old dictatorship.

The new tourism minister, Amel Karboul, said last month that she wanted to improve Tunisia’s image as a holiday destination by raising awareness of areas away from the coast like Ong Jmel, which have previously attracted little attention.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is considering ending its controversial ban on sports in girls’ state schools, after its consultative council recommended the ban be lifted over vociferous opposition from traditionalists.

Following a heated debate on Tuesday, the shura council recommended that the longstanding ban, already relaxed in private schools in May last year, be ended altogether, state media reported.

The appointed body, whose 150 members are overwhelmingly male, can only pass on its recommendation to the education ministry and has no powers to impose it.

All education in Saudi Arabia is strictly single-sex, but sports in girls schools remains a sensitive issue in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom where women have to cover from head to toe when in public.

Opponents argued that girls’ state schools lacked sports facilities and rejected supporters’ claims that sports provision would help combat rising childhood obesity, an aide to the shura council chairman said.

But the council finally approved the recommendation after agreeing that it did not run counter to the strict version of Sharia Law imposed in the kingdom, Fahad Al Ahmad told the official SPA news agency.

The council cited a ruling by the kingdom’s late top cleric, or grand mufti, Sheikh Abdel Aziz Bin Baz, that women were entitled to play sports “within the limits set by Islamic law”.

The issue of Saudi women in sport came under the spotlight at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, when the kingdom bowed to international pressure and sent female athletes to compete for the first time.

The International Olympic Committee agreed to allow the two Saudi women — a judo player and a middle-distance runner — to compete with their heads and bodies covered in deference to the Islamic dress code enforced in Saudi Arabia.

But despite the two athletes’ participation, Human Rights Watch says that millions of Saudi women remain effectively barred from sports.

Saudi authorities shut down private gyms for women in 2009 and 2010, and women are effectively barred from sports arenas by strict rules banning men and women mixing in public.

VIENNA — Iran will never slow down its nuclear research programme, its supreme leader said on Wednesday as negotiators from Tehran and six world powers struggled to narrow “significant gaps” that the United States warned might be insurmountable.

The stakes in a deal are high on both sides. Western powers, along with Russia and China, want to prevent chronic tensions in the Middle East from boiling over into a wider war or triggering a regional nuclear arms race. Iran, for its part, is keen to be rid of international sanctions hobbling its oil-based economy.

Clerical supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the Islamic republic’s negotiating team in Vienna should not yield to issues “forced upon them”.

“These negotiations should continue,” he told nuclear scientists in Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported. “But all should know that negotiations will not stop or slow down any of Iran’s activities in nuclear research and development.”

Tehran denies suspicions that it has used its declared civilian atomic energy programme as a front for covertly developing the means to make nuclear weapons, maintaining that it seeks only electricity from its enrichment of uranium.

Negotiators from Iran and the so-called P5+1 — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — plan after their two days of talks in Vienna to start drafting a long-term agreement on settling their decade-old nuclear dispute by a self-imposed deadline of July 20.

They will begin their next round of talks in the Austrian capital on May 13, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, coordinating the talks for the powers, told reporters while standing next to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif.

“A lot of intensive work will be required to overcome the differences,” she said after the April 8-9 meeting ended. “We will aim to bridge the gaps in all the key areas.”

A senior US administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters: “Now we are set to start drafting. At this point we don’t know if we’ll be successful in bridging those gaps.”

Russia’s chief negotiator, however, suggested progress had been achieved on how to resolve concerns about Iran’s planned Arak research reactor. Tehran says is a facility designed to produce radio-isotopes for medical treatments; the West suspects it will be geared to yielding plutonium for atomic bombs.

“The possibility of a compromise on this issue has grown,” Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying. “Centimetre by centimetre, drop by drop, we are moving forward. In general there is a positive dynamic.”

Zarif said more than half of the issues had been sorted out.

“We have agreement over 50 to 60 per cent of the [final] draft ... but the remaining parts are very important and contain various issues,” Zarif told reporters.

The US official, however, had a somewhat different view: “The only thing that matters at the end of the day is to get to the agreement... Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

‘Sense of urgency’

Iran says that its ballistic missile programme, banned under sanctions the UN Security Council imposed over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, would not be discussed in the talks. But the US official, asked if the missile programme came up, said “every single issue you can imagine” had been raised.

“The Iranians clearly have a sense of urgency to get a deal done, as does the P5+1 [the six powers],” a senior diplomat close to the talks said, but “there are still some significant gaps”.

The toughest issues to be tackled are Iran’s future uranium enrichment capacity, nuclear facilities that Western powers believe have little or no civilian value, future nuclear research as well as the sequencing of steps to remove the international sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.

Despite Khamenei’s pledge to the contrary, US and European officials say they will insist on limits to Iran’s efforts to develop more efficient enrichment technology that would enable Tehran to produce sensitive nuclear material at a faster pace.

Enriched uranium provides the fuel for civilian nuclear power stations but also, if refined to a high degree, the fissile core of a nuclear bomb.

Background tensions over Russia’s involvement in Ukraine and Western threats of further sanctions against Moscow and over the US denial of a visa for Iran’s proposed new UN envoy in New York have so far not harmed the nuclear talks, diplomats say.

The US official reiterated that Russia’s delegation continued to play a “constructive, focused role”. Asked if the dispute over Iran’s UN ambassador nominee was having an impact on the negotiations, the official only repeated the White House statement that the nominee is “not viable”.

‘Red lines’ 

The six powers’ immediate goal in the talks is to extend as much as possible Iran’s so-called breakout” period — the time it would need to develop a nuclear weapon. US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday the current Western assessment of Iran’s capability in this regard is two months.

Khamenei, who has the last say on Iran’s affairs of state, has repeatedly said that the OPEC member’s “red lines” are that it will never give up enrichment or shut any nuclear complex.

Among the global powers’ most pressing concerns are Iran’s centrifuge research and development programme, the size of its uranium stockpiles, the future of the Arak reactor project and of the future of the Fordow underground enrichment plant, a secret site until Western intelligence uncovered it in 2009.

Iran’s priority is an end to sanctions that have drastically reduced its oil income and virtually barred it from the international financial system. Tehran also wants to regain what it regards as its rightful place as a leading regional power.

The Vienna talks are building on a preliminary deal that Iran and the powers reached in Geneva last November. That agreement provided Iran with limited sanctions relief in exchange for a six-month suspension of some nuclear activities, including higher-grade enrichment, that began on Jan. 20.

The UN nuclear agency said on Wednesday that Iran was complying with the November interim deal. The US official said Washington was also fulfilling its commitments regarding the limited sanctions relief promised to Tehran under that accord.