Region

CAIRO — Egypt’s former army chief and leading presidential candidate Abdel Fattah Al Sisi suggested on Tuesday he would not receive an Israeli prime minister absent concessions to Palestinians in peace talks.

The retired field marshal, who toppled elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July, is expected to sweep the May 26-27 election. His only rival is leftist politician Hamdeen Sabbahi.

“Let them just make us happy by giving something for the Palestinians,” he said in a television interview, when asked if he would receive an Israeli prime minister or visit the neighbouring country if elected.

Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979, but ties remained formally cold over Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.

Sisi suggested Israel should agree first to a Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed last month, with both sides blaming each other for the failure.

The Egyptian military is engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign against Islamist fighters in the Sinai Peninsula near Israel’s border who have killed hundreds of security personnel, and also attacked Israel.

Israel has also voiced support for a crackdown by Egypt on smuggling tunnels linking Sinai with the Palestinian Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Islamist Hamas movement.

Hamas has been banned in Egypt and its fighters are accused of involvement in attacks and prison breaks in the country during the 2011 uprising against veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Scores of its alleged fighters are standing trial, in absentia, with the now detained Morsi on related charges.

Sisi said the military’s campaign had destroyed most of the smuggling tunnels to Gaza and dried up Hamas’ profits from the contraband.

But he refused to say whether Hamas “opposed” Egypt.

“I want to tell Egyptians: don’t let the situation and feelings against Hamas affect your historic position on the Palestinian cause,” he said.

Egypt controls the only border crossing with Gaza that bypasses Israel, opening intermittently for “humanitarian” cases.

Israel blockaded the strip in 2006, after Hamas fighters kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

LAVI/LUBYA, Israel — Some 10,000 Arab Israelis rallied in northern Israel on Tuesday to demand the right of return for refugees expelled after the creation of Israel in 1948.

The demonstration took place in the Israeli village of Lavi, which was built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lubya.

Lubya was home to 2,726 Palestinians until 1948, when Jewish forces occupied the village during the Arab-Israeli conflict that led to the creation of the Jewish state.

Demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and read out the names of 530 Palestinian villages that were emptied 66 years ago, before observing a minute’s silence in their memory.

“A demonstration organised by Israeli Arab associations gathered about 10,000 people and two youths were arrested for violence against the police,” Israeli security spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Groups demanding the right of return for Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948 organised the event under the slogan: “Your ‘independence’ day is our ‘Nakbeh’,” Arabic for catastrophe.

“There will be no peace, no stability and no reconciliation without the refugees’ right of return,” Arab Israeli lawmaker Mohammad Barakei told AFP.

More than 760,000 Palestinians — estimated today to number 4.8 million with their descendants — fled or were driven from their homes in 1948.

Palestinians mark Nakbeh day on May 15, but Arab Israelis hold demonstrations on Israeli independence day, which fell on Tuesday this year.

Around 160,000 Palestinians stayed behind and are now known as Arab Israelis. They number about 1.3 million and make up some 20 per cent of Israel’s population.

Most of Lubya’s original inhabitants settled in the Yarmouk refugee camp in the suburbs of Damascus.

In Israeli-annexed Arab East Jerusalem, Israeli forces dispersed a demonstration by Jewish extremists, who marched through the streets of the Old City chanting anti-Arab slogans, the security spokeswoman said.

Israeli arrested two of the demonstrators who tried to force their way past a checkpoint, she added.

DUBAI — A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced the editor of an Internet forum he founded to discuss the role of religion in the conservative Islamic kingdom to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes, Saudi media reported on Wednesday.

Raif Badawi, who started the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, was originally sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in July last year, but an appeals court overturned the sentence and ordered a retrial.

Apart from imposing a stiffer sentence on Badawi in his retrial, the judge at the criminal court in the Red Sea City of Jeddah also fined him 1 million riyals ($266,600). Badawi’s website has been closed since his first trial.

His lawyers said Wednesday’s sentence was too harsh, although the prosecutor had demanded a harsher penalty, news website Sabq reported. The ruling is subject to appeal.

The prosecution had demanded that Badawi be tried for apostasy, a charge which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The judge in last year’s trial had dismissed the apostasy charges.

Badawi was arrested in June 2012 and charged with cyber crime and disobeying his father — a crime in Saudi Arabia.

His website included articles that were critical of senior religious figures such as Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, according to Human Rights Watch.

In a separate ruling on Tuesday, the court also convicted the administrator of a website on charges of supporting Internet forums hostile to the state and which promoted demonstrations, Sabq reported on Wednesday. It said he was sentenced to six years in jail and a 50,000 riyal fine.

The news website said another Saudi was sentenced to five years in jail for publishing a column by a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric on his website.

The world’s top oil exporter follows the strict Wahhabi School of Sunni Islam and applies Islamic law, Sharia. Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.

Rattled by the uprisings that destabilised the Middle East in recent years, Riyadh intensified a crackdown on domestic dissent with arrests and prosecutions.

In April, prominent Saudi rights lawyer and activist Waleed Abu Al Khair was detained incommunicado after appearing in court in Riyadh on sedition charges, according to his wife.

Also in April, a Saudi court sentenced an unidentified activist to six years in jail on charges including taking part in illegal demonstrations and organising women’s protests.

Another was sentenced to three years in jail for spreading lies against King Abdullah and inciting the public against him.

SANAA — Yemen, involved in a military offensive against Al Qaeda in the south of the country, said security forces in the capital shot dead a militant suspected of killing a French security agent two days before, state news agency Saba reported on Wednesday.

Special forces shot Wael Abdallah Masoud Al Waeli and another man after they resisted arrest Sanaa early on Wednesday, Saba quoted the interior ministry as saying. A third member of the group was captured alive.

Yemeni forces are conducting an offensive against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its local offshoot, Ansar Al Sharia Al Qaeda and captured the militants’ main stronghold in the south on Tuesday.

Yemeni security sources accuse Al Qaeda of conducting assassinations, including the killing of the Frenchman who was working as a security agent for the EU mission in the capital Sanaa on Monday, as a way of deflecting pressure on their fighters in the battlefront.

“He [Waeli] was the supervisor behind the killing of the French citizen the day before yesterday,” Yemen’s supreme security committee said, according to Saba.

Waeli had organised other attacks on Westerners, it said, including the kidnapping of a Dutch couple last year who were released in December after six months in captivity, and was also involved in an attack on the central prison in Sanaa in February that freed at least 19 Al Qaeda-linked inmates.

The level of retaliatory attacks against security forces has risen sharply since the start of the army offensive last week.

Gunmen shot dead a police officer in the southern province of Lahj, Saba quoted a local official as saying on Wednesday. Ali Haidar Mater, a local official in Lahj, also survived an assassination attempt by gunmen.

The army captured the southern town of Al Mahfad in Abyan province, one of two Al Qaeda strongholds, on Tuesday and on Wednesday, the defence ministry a number of “terrorists” in Shabwa — the other province where fighting is taking place — had been killed in clashes.

A military source said a militant commander known as Abu Dajana had been killed in the Shabwa fighting. Saba said security forces had also found the body of a militant known as Abu Ayyoub Al Jaza’iri (the Algerian) in Abyan.

Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has said many AQAP fighters in Yemen are foreigners. Yemen has announced the death of an Uzbek militant and a Chechen.

ADDIS ABABA — South Sudan’s government said on Wednesday it had ordered a one-month suspension of attacks on rebel forces as international pressure mounts for an end to an ethnic conflict that has raised fears of genocide.

South Sudanese Information Minister Michael Makuei Lueth said the government’s commitment to honour a “month of tranquillity”, proposed on Monday at peace talks in Ethiopia, meant the army could still fight back if attacked.

There was no immediate word from the rebels.

“We have already given our forces an order,” Lueth told a news conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where months of peace talks have made little progress.

A ceasefire deal struck in January swiftly fell apart, with each side blaming the other for fighting that has exacerbated deep-rooted tensions between President Salva Kiir’s Dinka people and the Nuer tribe of his sacked deputy president, Riek Machar. The conflict has largely followed ethnic faultlines.

Kiir and Machar are due to hold face-to-face talks in Addis Ababa on Friday.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Juba last week that Kiir had committed himself to talks on a transitional government, and has threatened Machar with sanctions if he does not meet Kiir.

South Sudanese Foreign Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin told Reuters on Wednesday that the plan envisaged a “transitional process” that would last until the next election in 2015.

“President Kiir will stay in power until the elections take place,” he said.

Machar has called for Kiir to resign, saying he lost the people’s trust after fighting broke out in the presidential guard in December and quickly spread across the country, which is about the size of Texas.

Thousands of civilians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes.

Growing frustration

In a sign of growing frustration at the failure of South Sudan’s leaders to end the bloodshed, the United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on two commanders on opposing sides of the ethnic violence.

The sanctions were imposed under an executive order that US President Barack Obama signed in April to hold to account those responsible for the unrest in South Sudan — whose secession from Sudan in 2011 was seen as a major US policy success.

Norway, another of South Sudan’s main Western sponsors and donors, also made clear that its patience was running out.

“We made it clear that the international community will react even firmer in the coming months if they don’t take responsibility in ending the fighting and find a solution for an inclusive government for the future,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Bende told Reuters in Addis Ababa.

Benjamin said in Juba that he had understood from Kerry that the regional African group IGAD, which is sponsoring the peace talks, would take the lead on any foreign sanctions.

“We were surprised that the United States pre-empted what they had agreed upon,” he said, although he added that he doubted relations with Washington would be damaged.

The sanctions targeted Peter Gadet, an army commander loyal to Machar, and Major General Marial Chanuong, head of Kiir’s presidential guard. One US official said both men had “blood on their hands”.

DUBAI — Saudi Arabia replaced the head of Jeddah’s King Fahd Hospital on Tuesday as it struggled with mounting deaths from the SARS-like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome ahead of an influx of Muslim pilgrims in July.

The health ministry said on its website the move aimed to fight the spread of the virus and would “guarantee the immediate improvement of the medical care service” in the hospital, where a number of MERS patients are being treated.

In a separate statement, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said outbreaks of MERS in Jeddah’s two main hospitals — King Fahd and King Faisal — were partly due to “breaches” in its recommended infection prevention and control measures.

But current evidence indicated there has been no significant change in the virus’ ability to spread, the WHO said after a five-day mission by a team of experts to Saudi Arabia.

“The majority of human-to-human infections occurred in healthcare facilities. One quarter of all cases have been healthcare workers,” WHO said.

There was a clear need to improve healthcare workers’ knowledge and attitudes about the disease and systematically apply WHO’s recommended measures in healthcare facilities.

Saudi Arabia has reported 431 cases of MERS since the disease was identified in 2012, of which 117 have been fatal, according to the latest figures posted on the ministry website.

The spread of new infections slowed during the winter, but there has been a sudden increase since last month, with many of the new cases recorded in Jeddah, the kingdom’s second city.

Two deaths were reported on Tuesday, along with 10 new cases in Jeddah, in the capital Riyadh, in the western city of Taif and in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The upsurge is of particular concern because of the influx of pilgrims from around the world expected in July during the holy month of Ramadan.

Amid growing public disquiet at the spread of the disease, King Abdullah sacked his health minister on April 21.

The authorities have at times struggled to counter rumours swirling on social media that they have not been transparent about the spread of the disease and the effectiveness of the prevention measures implemented so far.

MERS is a coronavirus like SARS, which killed around 800 people worldwide after first appearing in China in 2002. It can cause coughing, fever and pneumonia and there is no vaccine or anti-viral treatment against it.

Scientists say MERS does not transmit easily between people, although it could mutate. The most likely animal reservoir from which new cases are becoming infected is Saudi Arabia’s large population of camels.

Arab countries including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Tunisia have all reported cases of MERS, as well as several countries in Europe.

Last week, the United States confirmed its first case, a man who had been a health worker in Saudi Arabia.

BEIRUT — The timing of an evacuation of rebels from the central Syrian city of Homs under a deal with government forces has not been set and could still take days to arrange, the provincial governor said on Tuesday.

The withdrawal of the insurgents from Homs — a city once called "the capital of the revolution" — would amount to a major symbolic victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad but has been delayed since a ceasefire was agreed on Friday.

Rebels have held out in the Old City district and several other areas despite being undersupplied, outgunned and subjected to more than a year of siege by Assad's forces.

Homs governor Talal Barazi said arrangements for any withdrawal would take time and declined to say when it would likely happen.

"The conditions are helpful and the atmosphere is suitable for achieving positive steps toward settlement and reconciliation and the exit of armed groups, but we have not set a date yet," he told Al Manar television, run by Assad ally Hizbollah.

"The next few days will witness, God willing, steps like this, and we hope there will be a date soon," he added.

The reasons for the delay were not immediately clear, but the pull-out is part of a multifaceted arrangement that also includes allowing food and medical aid into the largely Shiite towns of Nubl and Al Zahraa in the northern province of Aleppo which have been besieged by rebels for more than a year.

The rebels fighting to overthrow Assad are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, while the president’s allies include Shiite Iran and Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbollah. Assad is an Alawite, a sect derived from Shi’ite Islam.

Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the United Nations and local councils had mediated the talks between rebel groups on one side and government forces, loyalist militias, Hizbollah and the provincial government on the other.

Representatives from the Russian and Iranian embassies had been present, but it was not clear if they were taking part in the negotiations, the group said.

The observatory said the government would take control of Al Waer neighbourhood in addition to entering the areas of Juret Al Shayah, Al Qarabis, Al Hamidiya, Wadi Al Sayih and the Old City in Homs.

The fighters would be allowed to keep light weapons to defend themselves against any breach of the agreement, it said.

More than 150,000 people have died in the rebellion against Assad. Millions more have fled their homes and the government has lost control of swathes of territory across the north and east. Fighting regularly kills over 200 people a day.

Despite the carnage, Syrian authorities have scheduled presidential elections for June 3, a vote likely to give Assad a third term in office. Assad’s opponents have dimissed the election as a farce.

CAIRO — Egypt's ex-army chief and leading presidential candidate Abdel Fattah Al Sisi said Monday the Muslim Brotherhood movement of deposed leader Mohamed Morsi was "finished" in Egypt and would not return if he was elected.

Following the Sisi-led army ouster of Morsi in July, the Brotherhood has been banned, its leaders arrested and more than 1,400 people, mostly Islamist backers of Morsi, killed in protest clashes.

"I did not finish it, you Egyptians finished it," Sisi said in his first television interview since announcing his candidacy when asked if the Brotherhood was "finished".

Asked if he were saying it would not exist under his presidency, he responded: "Yes."

Sisi's remarks ruled out any chances of reconciliation with the blacklisted Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

The movement, which swept all elections since the 2011 fall of longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak, has already been blacklisted as a "terrorist organisation" by the military-installed authorities.

Sisi, dressed in a suit and appearing composed and often smiling in what was a pre-recorded interview, said Egyptians had rejected the group's ideology and would not allow it to return.

The retired field marshal also said in what was the first part of the interview that if he was elected the army would "not have a role in ruling Egypt", adding that he was not a candidate of the army.

Aside from Morsi, all of Egypt's previous presidents have come from military ranks, including Mubarak who was toppled following a popular 18-day uprising in early 2011.

Sisi's only rival in the upcoming election is leftist leader Hamdeen Sabbahi who has often raised concerns that Egypt was returning to the autocratic era witnessed under Mubarak.

These concerns grew after some leading symbols of the anti-Mubarak revolt were jailed by the interim authorities for organising unlicensed protests.

Last month an Egyptian court even banned the April 6 youth movement which had spearheaded the anti-Mubarak revolt.

Groups such as April 6 have increasingly protested against the interim government, accusing it of restricting freedom while giving police a free hand to crush dissent.

Egypt's interim authorities had justified the ouster of Morsi following mass protests against his divisive one-year rule.

Sisi is riding a wave of popularity after ousting Morsi on July 3 after millions took to the streets demanding the Islamist's resignation.

But the ouster of Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected president, and an ensuing police crackdown on his supporters and the Muslim Brotherhood has deeply polarised the country.

Morsi and most of the top leadership of his Muslim Brotherhood have also been put on trial.

When asked, meanwhile, if he had faced any assassination attempts, Sisi without elaborating said: "Two attempts".

RAMALLAH — Palestinian public sector workers received their salaries on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, in a sign that Israel had backed down from a threat to impose sanctions as peace talks began to collapse last month.

Israel had said on April 10 it would withhold funds after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a series of international human rights conventions he hoped would allow Palestinians to eventually challenge Israel at the United Nations, which recognised Palestine as a non-member state in 2012.

US-backed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations ended on April 29 with no breakthrough.

Palestinian officials said the payment reflected Israel’s decision to transfer more than $100 million in customs duties it collects on goods headed to Palestinian-run areas through border crossings it controls.

The money accounts for about two-thirds of the Palestinian budget and is key to keeping its large public sector functioning and maintaining stability in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel had said it would dock payment of over $100 million it said the Palestinian government owed it in utility bills.

Israeli officials could not be immediately reached for comment during a national holiday.

Speaking last week, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah told reporters Israel would be paying the near usual monthly amount of 450 million shekels ($130.3 million) and only deducting 20 million shekels ($5.8 million) as part of a loan taken out by a previous Palestinian government.

Palestinians say their economy cannot reach its full potential while it remains under partial Israeli control. They seek an independent state in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Israeli, Palestinian and US officials say they hope to revive peace talks given the right conditions.

DUBAI — Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif survived a censure vote in parliament on Tuesday for his refusal to deny the Holocaust, in the latest battle with hardliners trying to undermine President Hassan Rouhani’s overtures to the West.

Zarif, who is Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, caused uproar among hardline conservatives in Iran when he called the Holocaust a “horrifying tragedy” in an interview with a German television station earlier this year.

He has received several warnings and had previously been called to parliament to account for his perceived soft line on traditional enemies Israel and the United States.

In Tuesday’s hearing, broadcast live on state radio, 75 Islamic hardliners in the 290-member assembly questioned him on a range of issues, including his stance on “illegitimate” Israel and the “lie of the Holocaust”.

In a victory for moderates trying to shed the “anti-Semitic” image cultivated by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the house voted against censuring Zarif.

The foreign minister turned the questions into an attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

To bursts of applause, he said: “Netanyahu shamelessly claims Iran denies the Holocaust, that we are after a nuclear bomb to create another Holocaust. As long as I am foreign minister, I will not allow the Holocaust to be exploited to ruin our national image and dignity.”

Holocaust denial has been a theme of public speeches by leaders in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ahmadinejad called the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis during World War II “a myth”.

Ahmadinejad’s stance damaged Iran’s global image and helped energise international efforts to curb its nuclear programme, suspected by the West of being aimed at seeking nuclear weapons capability. Tehran says its nuclear activities are for power generation and medical research.

The reformist government of Ahmadinejad’s successor, Rouhani, has tried to reverse the path of antagonism to the West, openly engaging in dialogue with the United States over the nuclear dispute.

Rouhani himself called the Holocaust “reprehensible” in a US television interview last year.

But hardliners, consisting mainly of followers of Ahmadinejad and his spiritual mentor Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, have been fighting hard to block progress in both the nuclear talks and normalising ties with Washington.

On Saturday, opponents of the nuclear talks staged a gathering at the site of the former US embassy in Tehran, overrun by militants and occupied since 1979.

On Sunday, Rouhani told a group of academics, according to the official IRNA news agency: “There are people whose every cell is made of doubt. They panic at every step taken to talk. They want to bare swords to the world all the time.

“We don’t want to fight. We want to talk, reason and communicate. We may fail, we may succeed, but we won’t give up, we will keep going until we find a way.”