Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli and Palestinian negotiators ended another US-mediated session on Tuesday with no sign of a breakthrough in efforts to save peace talks from collapse, but an Israeli official said they had agreed to meet again.

In a statement about the latest discussions, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: “Gaps remain, but both sides are committed to narrow the gaps.”

The US-brokered negotiations, which began in July, plunged into crisis last week after Israel, demanding a Palestinian commitment to continue talking beyond an April 29 deadline for a peace deal, failed to carry out a promised release of about two dozen Palestinian prisoners.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas responded by signing 15 global treaties, including the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war and occupations, on behalf of the State of Palestine, a defiant move that surprised Washington and angered Israel.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking on Israel Radio on Tuesday, said Abbas would have to reverse that step in order for the prisoner release to be re-addressed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened unspecified retaliation in response to what Israel views as a unilateral statehood move by Abbas. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al Malki said Abbas would appeal at an Arab League meeting in Cairo on Wednesday for political and economic support in the event of Israeli punitive measures.

Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour said on Tuesday that the Palestinians were prepared to join more international groups if Israel retaliated. As a UN non-member state, Palestinians can join 63 international agencies and accords.

“If they want to escalate further and try to illegally punish us for doing something legal, we are ready and willing to send the second barrage, the third barrage and more of what legally we could do,” Mansour told the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

As part of the US-led bid to salvage the talks, Israeli chief negotiator Tzipi Livni and Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat, along with US mediator Martin Indyk, reconvened late on Monday after what the United States had described as a “serious and constructive” meeting on Sunday.

“The atmosphere was business-like and the sides agreed to meet again to try to find a solution to the crisis,” said an Israeli official, who asked not to be identified, after the latest talks wrapped up in the early hours of Tuesday.

The official did not say when the next meeting would be held. There was no immediate Palestinian comment about any future session.

Stumbling blocks

Expectations among the Israeli and Palestinian public of a peace deal have been low from the start. The talks have stalled over Palestinian opposition to Israel’s demand that it be recognised as a Jewish state, and over settlements built on occupied land Palestinians seek for a country of their own.

Looking ahead to possible Israeli economic sanctions, Malki said that at the Arab League session, Abbas would voice concern Israel might again withhold tax revenues it transfers to the Palestinian Authority.

Interim peace deals task Israel with collecting taxes and customs duties for the PA amounting to around $100 million a month, on goods imported into the Palestinian territories. Israel has previously frozen the payments during times of heightened security and diplomatic tensions.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who has signalled he may scale back his mediating efforts due to “unhelpful actions” by both sides, was due to meet President Barack Obama on Tuesday, with the state of the peace negotiations high on the agenda.

A senior official in Abbas’ Fateh Party said that in order for the talks to continue, Palestinians would need a written commitment from Israel recognising a Palestinian state within all of the territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip captured in the 1967 Middle East war, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Israel has described those West Bank borders as indefensible and considers East Jerusalem as part of its capital, a claim not recognised internationally. Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, now ruled by Hamas Islamists, in 2005.

The Fateh official said Palestinians were also demanding a cessation of settlement activity and a prisoner release.

Palestinians fear settlements, viewed as illegal by most countries, will deny them a viable state and have condemned a series of Israeli construction projects announced while talks have been under way.

GENEVA — A looming drought in Syria could push millions more people into hunger and exacerbate a refugee crisis caused by years of civil war, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Syria’s breadbasket northwestern region has received less than half of the average rainfall since September and, if it stays dry up to wheat harvest time in mid-May, the country — already reliant on aid for millions of people — will need to import even more food.

“A drought could put the lives of millions more people at risk,” Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN aid agency World Food Programme (WFP), told a news briefing.

Based on rainfall data and satellite images, and with the smallest area planted with wheat in 15 years, output of the cereal is likely to be a record low of between 1.7 million and 2 million tonnes, as much as 29 per cent less than last year and about half of pre-conflict levels, the WFP said.

Barley and livestock production are also being hit.

In addition to the worst drought since 2008, three years of civil war have ravaged infrastructure, leaving long-term damage to irrigation due to damaged pumps and canals, power failures and a lack of spare parts, the agency said.

This will have “long-lasting effects on Syria’s agricultural production” even after peace is restored, it said.

The threat posed by drought meant the number of Syrians in need of emergency rations could rise to 6.5 million, up from 4.2 million now, Byrs said.

The WFP, which reached a record 4.1 million people with rations in March, said on Monday that it had to cut the size of food parcels to hungry Syrians due to a shortage of funds from donors.

WFP, which feeds hungry people around the world, says the operation in Syria is its biggest and most complex, costing more than $40 million a week.

The funding figure includes the feeding of 1.5 million of the 2.6 million registered Syrian refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries, mainly Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

“We can expect more refugees to leave if on top of the conflict they feel that their lives are in danger because there is no food. But it’s hard to say obviously because they could also move to other parts of Syria,” Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba, spokeswoman of the UN refugee agency, told reporters.

Overall, the United Nations has received just 16 per cent of the $2.2 billion sought for its aid operations inside Syria this year, with the United States the largest donor at $108 million, followed by the European Commission at $53.7 million and the United Arab Emirates at $50 million.

WASHINGTON — A threatened, but averted, American missile strike to punish Syria’s government for a chemical weapons attack last summer would not have been powerful enough to change the course in the Syrian civil war, Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday, in an attempt to deflect criticism that the US hasn’t done enough to stem the violence there.

Under pointed questioning by a Senate panel he used to chair, Kerry said the scrubbed strike would have been limited, and would have been aimed only at preventing Syrian President Bashar Assad from delivering more chemical weapons to his forces.

“It would not have had a devastating impact by which he had to recalculate, because it wasn’t going to last that long,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Here we were going to have one or two days to degrade and send a message. ... We came up with a better solution.”

That solution, Kerry said, was to negotiate an agreement with Russia to lean on Assad to ship out and destroy his government’s chemical weapons stockpiles, considered to be one of the largest in the world. 

That agreement came after a frantic few days after President Barack Obama initially threatened to launch a missile strike in response to the August 21 chemical weapons attack. Obama pulled back because he decided congressional approval was necessary first.

Obama had earlier threatened that Assad would face consequences if he crossed a “red line” by launching deadly chemical weapons against his own people. The US says more than 1,400 Syrians were killed in the August 21 attack, although human rights groups have reported a lower death toll of below 1,000.

An estimated 140,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war that is now in its fourth year — including 60,000 since last August, said Sen. Bob Corker, the panel’s top Republican.

“We didn’t take actions at a time when we could have made a difference; so many on this committee wanted us to do that,” Corker said.

Kerry said more than half of Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile — 54 per cent — has so far been shipped out of Syria. He also said the US is sending increased assistance to moderate Syria opposition forces — something they have long pleaded for — but refused to offer any details about what the aid would consist of or where it would go. The US has resisted sending heavy weapons and massive lethal aid to Syrian rebels for fear it would fall into the hands of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups who are also fighting Assad in pockets across the country.

Kerry predicted that the war will end only through a negotiated political agreement — not a military strike by outside forces.

Sen. John McCain, a Republican who has long pushed for more lethal aid for Syrian rebels, scoffed.

“Any objective observer will tell you that Bashar Assad is winning on the battlefield,” McCain said.

GAZA CITY — Israel has barred 30 runners, including an Olympic athlete, from leaving the Gaza Strip to participate in a marathon later this week, highlighting Israel’s tight restrictions on travel in and out of the Hamas-ruled territory, Palestinian officials said Tuesday.

In the case of the Olympic runner, Nader Masri, the travel ban was upheld Tuesday by Israel’s supreme court. Masri, 34, participated in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Separately, 36 young musicians requested to leave Gaza for a week-long music competition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but were also denied permission, organisers said. An Israeli defence official said a final decision has not been made. The competition begins Wednesday.

The cases underscored Israel’s restrictions on Gaza, which human rights activists argue amount to collective punishment and are often arbitrary. They say the travel ban is part of an Israeli attempt to sever ties between Gaza and the West Bank, territories that lie on opposite ends of Israel and are sought by the Palestinians for a future state, along with East Jerusalem.

Israel and Gaza’s other neighbour, Egypt, have severely limited access to Gaza since the territory was seized by the Islamic Hamas in 2007. Virtually all exports from Gaza are banned and most of Gaza’s 1.7 million people cannot travel abroad. Israel considers Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks, a terrorist group.

The Palestinian Olympic Committee said it had asked Israel for permits for the 30 runners to leave Gaza so they could attend the second annual international marathon in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Friday.

Itidal Al Mugrabi, a senior official in the committee, said all requests were denied last month. She said the Bethlehem event, which will also include shorter races, was expected to draw some 700 runners from Europe in addition to local athletes.

After being denied a permit, Masri approached the Israeli rights group Gisha, which appealed to Israel’s Supreme Court.

The judges ruled Tuesday that they could not intervene in the defence minister’s policy considerations, but suggested the military consider more exemptions from the travel ban.

Masri said he was disappointed.

“The ban no doubt limits my ability to challenge other champions from elsewhere,” Masri said. He said he trains daily in the streets and three times a week in a local gym.

Ostensibly, Masri should have stood a good chance of getting the exit permit even under Israel’s stringent criteria.

Those permitted to leave Gaza, at least in principle, include members of the Palestinian Olympic team and the Palestinian football team, according to guidelines published in 2011 by the branch of Israel’s military dealing with implementing the policy towards Gaza.

According to that list, exceptions are also made for Gaza residents seeking to attend events in the West Bank sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, the self-rule government of Hamas’ political rival, President Mahmoud Abbas.

Maj. Guy Inbar, an Israeli defence official, said Masri’s request was denied because it “does not meet the rules for exceptions for sports events”.

Inbar said the Bethlehem marathon sponsored by the Palestinian Authority “has political overtones”, but did not elaborate. He initially said that others who applied for permits were support staff, but then said he needed to check that information.

Eitan Diamond, the head of Gisha, said underlying Israel’s policy is an attempt to “create a divide between the West Bank and Gaza, to remove Gaza from the consciousness of the Israeli public, to push Gaza away”.

ALGIERS — A protest group, founded just two months ago when ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika controversially decided to seek re-election, has livened up a lacklustre campaign from which the incumbent has been entirely absent.

Activists of the Barakat (Enough) movement have made their mark by daring to argue publicly that the 77-year-old Bouteflika, who is too sick to take to the campaign trail himself, is unfit to govern.

Around 40 of them were briefly detained by the security forces when they did so at a rally in central Algiers last month.

Co-founder Amina Bouraoui says the movement was born out of a desire to establish a genuine democracy in Algeria, and frustration at an “archaic” system that has shown “contempt for the people”.

“This year, we saw politicians calling on the president to seek a fourth term, even though he is very sick and has been in power for 15 years,” said Bouraoui, a 38-year-old gynaecologist, in an interview with the openDemocracy website.

She said the same politicians had “violated” the constitution by controversially amending it to allow Bouteflika to seek and win a third term in 2009.

“Both physically and mentally, he is in no condition to govern. So, we decided with activist friends to go out into the street and to say ‘no’.”

Barakat has branches in 20 of Algeria’s 48 provinces and has organised eight demonstrations since March 1, Bouraoui says.

The movement is campaigning for a boycott of the April 17 election, which it describes as a “masquerade” and “another affront to the Algerian people”.

Made up mostly of activists in their 20s and 30s, the movement has so far failed to draw large crowds to its rallies, and is unlikely to prevent the expected re-election of the incumbent.

But it remains a surprise factor and an irritant for the president’s campaign team, who have responded with allegations that the new group is a tool of foreign powers.

Citizens’ movement 

Barakat has also attracted the suspicion of opposition parties, who see in it a possible rival, even though it has no detailed blueprint for a post-Bouteflika Algeria.

“We are a citizens’ movement... We do not want to be a political party,” said Bouraoui, whose youthful, feminine looks contrast with those of the country’s ageing, mostly male politicians.

Bouteflika himself has rarely appeared in public at all since a minor stroke confined him to hospital in Paris for three months last year.

Growing up in the poor Algiers neighbourhood of Bab Al Oued the daughter of a cardiology professor, Bouraoui traces her political awareness back to the bloody riots of 1988, which some Algerians refer to as their “Arab Spring”.

“I was 12 years old in October 1988 when a young protest movement was violently suppressed,” Bouraoui recalls.

The social unrest led the government to end Algeria’s single-party system and paved the way for multi-party elections in 1991, which Islamists were poised to win.

The army’s decision to cancel the poll triggered a devastating civil war, in which up to 200,000 people were killed as Islamist groups battled troops in the country’s “black decade”.

Bouteflika, who came to power in 1999, is credited by his supporters with helping end the civil war through a policy of national reconciliation.

But Bouraoui says his reputation as a peacemaker is undeserved, pointing to the “Black Spring” of 2001 in which security forces, acting on Bouteflika’s orders, crushed Berber protests in the Kabylie region, east of the capital, at the cost of 126 lives.

Tensions boiled over in the Kabylie city of Bejaia on Saturday, when a crowd of demonstrators stormed a planned rally by Bouteflika representatives, attacking a television crew covering the event and torching portraits of the president.

Bouteflika’s campaign team cancelled the rally, blaming the violence on “fascists” from the Barakat movement, accusations the group strongly rejected on Monday.

Mustapha Benfodil, another Barakat cofounder, insisted it was a non-violent movement committed to peaceful reform, after the experience of the civil war of the 1990s which left Algerians “profoundly traumatised”.

JEDDAH — The main public hospital in the Saudi city of Jeddah has closed its emergency room after a rise in cases of the MERS virus among medical staff, the health ministry said Tuesday.

A Jeddah paramedic was among two more people Saudi health authorities reported on Sunday had died from the SARS-like disease, bringing the nationwide death toll to 66.

On Monday, the health ministry reported four more MERS cases in Jeddah, two of them among health workers, prompting authorities to close the emergency department at the city’s King Fahd Hospital.

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

It reassured residents that the situation remained “stable” and “all precautionary measures are being taken to deal with the virus”.

But the closure caused widespread public concern, fuelled by rumours on social networks.

“I’m afraid to send my children to school,” said Jeddah resident Bassem Ben Ali, 33.

Jeddah accounts for just 11 of the 175 cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome reported by Saudi authorities since the disease first appeared in the kingdom in September 2012.

Of those, two have died, six have recovered and three are still undergoing treatment.

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 the disease, for which there is no known vaccine.

A study has 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.

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 — Libya’s parliament asked Prime Minister Abdullah Al Thinni on Tuesday to form a new government within a week after the Cabinet demanded more powers to tackle the disorder crippling the OPEC country.

The weak central government, which must be reconfirmed by parliament every two weeks, has asked for a longer mandate to deal with Libya’s competing political parties, rival militias, regional demands and rebels disrupting the oil industry.

But General National Congress (GNC) spokesman Omar Hmeidan said the parliament would only decide after formation of a new Cabinet whether the caretaker government could stay on until a general election expected later this year.

In a sign of the confusion surrounding politics in Libya, the state news agency LANA as well as Libyan and Arab television stations had earlier reported that the Cabinet had quit.

“The GNC has appointed Abdullah Al-Thinni as the prime minister under a condition of forming a government within a week,” Hmeidan told Reuters.

Asked about the resignation reports, Cabinet spokesman Ahmed Lamim said: “The government is working normally but there was a letter sent to the General National Congress saying the government needs more authority to work.”

The central government has been unable to control militias that helped oust dictator Muammar Qadhafi in a 2011 uprising but kept their guns and carved out autonomous fiefs. The deepening turmoil has hit the North African state’s lifeblood oil exports.

After sacking Ali Zeidan as prime minister last month over an attempted oil sale by rebels in the volatile east, parliament gave Thinni a mandate that had to be renewed every two weeks.

The latest mandate expired on Monday and Cabinet spokesman Lamim said “a few days of extensions don’t help”.

Lawmaker Najah Salouh Abdulsalam said the GNC had written first to Thinni to say that his Cabinet was just a caretaker government with no right to make any decisions.

Thinni wrote back asking for more powers so his government can run the country, otherwise it would resign, she said.

Adding to the confusion, lawmaker Sharif Al Wafi said Tuesday’s parliamentary decision to ask Thinni to form a new Cabinet was invalid because it had lacked the necessary quorum.

Bowing to public pressure, the GNC has agreed to call new elections later this year but no date has been set. Many Libyans blame factional infighting for Libya’s bumpy transition since the NATO-backed uprising against Gaddafi in 2011.

Parliament is divided among competing factions, Islamists and more moderate forces, with more pressures coming from demands by the different regions in the vast desert country.

Thinni, a former army officer, scored a success earlier this week by working with tribal elders to convince rebels in the volatile east to end a nine-month blockage of oil ports.

The rebels agreed on Sunday to reopen the Zueitina and Hariga Ports immediately and two larger ports within a month pending further talks.

The government has promised to compensate the rebel fighters financially and investigate claims of oil corruption, but managed to ignore their demands for regional autonomy and a share of oil sales, according to the published agreement.

The blockage comes on top of protests at western oil facilities which have crippled output to around 150,000 barrels a day from 1.4 million bpd in July, draining state coffers.

Libya’s oil ministry said force majeure, a term to cover legal contractual obligations, was still imposed on the two ports, an oil ministry official said on Tuesday.

“It has not been lifted. NOC has not instructed the ports to export oil yet,” Ibrahim Al Awami said.

Awami said staff at Arabian Gulf Oil Co, which runs the Hariga terminal, had joined a general strike in the eastern city Benghazi that began on Sunday. It was unclear whether this would affect the port’s ability to resume exports.

Workers at Zueitina were doing maintenance and checking facilities before resuming exports, Awami said.

BAGHDAD — Attacks in Iraq left 15 people dead Tuesday while security forces said they killed 25 militants near Baghdad amid worries insurgents are encroaching on the capital weeks ahead of elections.

The latest violence is part of a protracted surge in nationwide bloodshed that has left more than 2,400 people dead since the start of the year, and sparked fears Iraq is slipping back into the all-out sectarian fighting that plagued it in 2006 and 2007.

The unrest has been driven principally by anger in the Sunni Arab community over alleged mistreatment at the hands of the Shiite-led government and security forces, as well as spillover from the civil war in neighbouring Syria.

In Tuesday’s bloodiest incident, soldiers killed 25 militants in an ambush southwest of Baghdad, the capital’s security spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan said.

Maan said the fighters were part of the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and that they were planning to attack an army base that they had attempted to hit last week.

Despite the tactical success, the killings illustrate the growing ambition of ISIL militants seeking to fight their way into Baghdad, with analysts and officials worrying that they are seeking to derail April 30 elections.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Tuesday, attacks north of the capital killed 15 people overall, security and medical officials said, including six members of the same family shot dead inside their home on the outskirts of the restive city of Mosul.

A car bomb set off by a suicide attacker at a checkpoint in the city of Tuz Khurmatu killed four policemen, while attacks were also carried out in Baiji and Tikrit in Salaheddin province.

Diplomats and analysts have urged the government to reach out to the Sunni community to undermine support for militancy.

But with the parliamentary elections looming, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki and other Shiite leaders have not wanted to be seen as appeasing political rivals.

Near-daily bloodshed is part of a long list of voter concerns that also include lengthy power cuts, poor wastewater treatment, rampant corruption and high unemployment.

The United Nations has warned that the election campaign, which got under way a week ago, will be “highly divisive”, underscoring fears that the polls could worsen the long-standing political deadlock, in which Iraq’s fractious unity government has passed little in the way of significant legislation.

“Campaigning will be highly divisive,” UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov told AFP in an interview on April 1.

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

Mladenov added: “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.”

“The efforts to reach across the sectarian divide are very weak.”

CAIRO — Telephone and Internet networks were briefly shut down to Egypt’s southern province of Aswan for several hours, as authorities moved to try to end a bloody tribal feud that killed 26 people over the past days, security officials and residents said Tuesday.

The officials said the shutdown was part of a plan aimed at preventing contacts while security forces prepare operations to disarm the two feuding sides, an Arab clan and a Nubian family.

Tribal leaders engaged in mediation talks with government officials have complained that contacts with the media and through Internet and mobile phones have fuelled the tension in the past days by spreading news about the carnage, the officials said.

Security forces have used such communications shutdowns repeatedly in the Sinai Peninsula during their offensive against Islamic militants there.

The state news agency MENA quoted communications company officials as saying a technical failure caused the cut, without elaborating. It said there was a blanket communications cut in Aswan for hours, disrupting banks, government offices, and offices issuing plane and train tickets.

The fighting in Aswan province, about 880 kilometres, from the capital, erupted Friday. It reportedly began after a fight last week between school students drew in adults, sparking the clashes that turned deadly Friday. Police said the fight was over the harassment of a girl. Witnesses said offensive graffiti on the school walls taunting the Nubian family and the Arab clan with racial slurs fuelled the violence.

The state news agency MENA said the toll from three days of fighting rose to 26 when one person died from extensive burns suffered earlier.

One of the officials said the fighting, which began Friday, had become a “national security issue”. The previous evening, the interim president met with the National Security Council, a body of top security officials, to come up with a plan to confront the violence.

One of the officials said severing communications aimed to give cover for troops during searches for weapons and suspects. The shutdown lasted about three hours, during which attempts to reach Aswan residents by phone were unsuccessful. By the afternoon, communications at least partially returned. But it was not clear what operations had been carried out.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to speak to reporters.

An Associated Press photographer in Aswan said officers said an operation was underway but didn’t elaborate. A joint police and military force was seen searching at least one home in the neighbourhood where most of the killing took place, but it was not clear if they were looking for suspects or weapons.

The communication cut down also came soon after the country’s chief prosecutor visited the area from Cairo. Prosecutor Hisham Barakat toured the area were the fighting took place, where several homes were torched, and where most of the 26, mostly from the Arab clan, were killed.

Security officials say members of the impoverished Arab clan are involved in arms and drugs smuggling. The fight took on a political overtone when the Arab clan accused the ethnic Nubians of supporting the military, while the Nubians say the Arabs back ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and are protected by officials loyal to longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Local leaders say police were mostly absent from the streets, causing the violence to spread. The governor appealed for the military to deploy troops there.

VIENNA — The United States said on Tuesday Iran has the ability to produce fissile material for a nuclear bomb in two months, if it so decided, as Tehran and six world powers swung into a new round of talks in Vienna on resolving their atomic dispute.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s comments in Washington highlighted Western concerns about Iran’s nuclear intentions and the wide divisions between the two sides that could still foil a deal. Iran says its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.

The overarching goal of the powers — Britain, France, China, Russia, Germany and the United States — in the talks is to persuade Iran to scale back its programme to the point that it would take it much longer, perhaps as much as a year, to produce fuel for a bomb if it chose to do so.

“I think it’s public knowledge today that we’re operating with a time period for a so-called ‘break-out’ of about two months. That’s been in the public domain,” Kerry testified at a Senate hearing.

Iran’s “break-out” time is defined as how long it would take it to produce fissile material for one nuclear weapon, if it decided to build such weapons of mass destruction.

To lengthen this potential timeline, the powers want Iran to cut back the number of centrifuges it operates refine uranium and the overall amount of enriched uranium it produces, as well as to limit its research into new technologies and submit to invasive inspections by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog.

The Islamic Republic says its nuclear fuel-making activity is only for peaceful purposes such as electricity generation, and it wants the West to lift crippling economic sanctions as part of any final accord with the powers.

The February 8-9 round is the third meeting between the powers and Iran since February, and part of a series which they hope will culminate in a broad settlement of the decade-old nuclear dispute that threatens to sink the Middle East into a new war.

The meetings so far have been used by the sides largely as an opportunity to spell out their positions on issues such as the scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts, its contested nuclear facilities, rather than to narrow their differences.

“We are involved in very detailed and substantial negotiations and we are trying as hard as we can to drive the process forward,” the spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who coordinates the discussions on behalf of the powers, told reporters.

Getting into the details

Both sides say they want to start drafting a comprehensive agreement in May, some two months before a July 20 deadline for finalising the accord.

“What matters most to us is that there is a good agreement. Clearly we want to make progress as fast as possible but the most important thing is the quality of the agreement,” Ashton’s spokesman, Michael Mann, said.

“It has to be a good agreement that everyone is happy with. So we will work as hard was we can to achieve that.”

Iranian and US negotiators are wary that any deal will face criticism from conservative hardliners at home wedded to confrontation since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The six nations have agreed internally to have a draft text of an accord by the end of May or early June, one diplomat from the powers said. But he added: “We’re still in an exploratory phase... In the end, things will happen in July.”

Tuesday’s opening session was chaired by Ashton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, but their deputies later took over.

The diplomat said issues to be discussed included how UN nuclear inspectors would verify whether Iran was meeting its end of any deal, suspected past atomic bomb research by Tehran and how to deal with UN Security Council resolutions on Iran adopted since 2006.

A senior Iranian negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, said major issues discussed in previous meetings — Iran’s level of uranium enrichment and a heavy-water nuclear reactor project at Arak — would also be covered.

Refined uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power plants, Iran’s stated purpose, but can also provide material for a bomb, which the West suspects may be Tehran’s ultimate aim. The Arak reactor, once operational, can yield plutonium — another weapons-usable fissile material — but Iran says it only intends to use it for medical and agricultural research ends.

The goal of the negotiations begun almost two months ago is to hammer out a long-term deal to define the permissible scope of Iran’s nuclear programme in return for an end to sanctions that have hobbled the OPEC country’s economy.

In November, the two sides agreed an interim accord curbing some Iranian enrichment activities in exchange for some easing of sanctions. This six-month deal, which took effect on January 20, was designed to buy time for talks on a final accord.

The talks can be extended by another half-year if both sides agree to do so and negotiate the content of an extension deal.

Israel has threatened to attack its long-time foe Iran if diplomatic efforts fail. Iran says it is Israel’s assumed atomic arsenal that threatens peace and stability in the Middle East.