Region

RAMALLAH — Palestinian leaders on Tuesday threatened to renew their diplomatic push at the United Nations if Israel fails to free Arab prisoners as scheduled this weekend.

When US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace resumed in July, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed that for their nine-month duration he would shelve efforts to use the UN’s November 2012 recognition of Palestine as a non-member observer to press for membership in international bodies where it could fight Israeli occupation.

In exchange for the diplomatic ceasefire Israel was to release 104 Arabs imprisoned since before the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the sides.

It has so far freed 78 with the final batch due for release on March 29.

“We shall turn to the UN’s international organisations if Israel does not release the fourth and final group of prisoners,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s executive committee.

“The release of the prisoners is in return for the freeze on seeking membership in international organisations,” he told official Voice of Palestine radio.

Israel wants the so-far inconclusive peace talks extended beyond their April 29 deadline and ministers have warned that should the Palestinians refuse, the remaining prisoners will not be freed.

“If Israel were to refuse to free the fourth batch it would have serious consequences, including initiatives at the United Nations,” former Palestinian negotiator Mohammed Shtayeh said in a statement.

Israel particularly objects to the Palestinians’ demand for Arab Israelis or Palestinian residents of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem convicted of militant acts to be included in the release, even though both groups were included in a 2011 swap of 1,027 Arab prisoners for captive soldier Gilad Shalit.

A senior Palestinian official told AFP on the condition of anonymity that in recent talks with US special envoy Martin Indyk, Abbas warned that if the April 29 talks deadline was not met “Israel would be in violation of agreements and [the Palestinians] would have the right to turn to the UN and to take any measures it deems necessary.”

BAGHDAD — The board of Iraq’s electoral commission resigned en masse on Tuesday in protest at political and judicial “interference”, throwing a general election due next month into disarray.

The sudden decision comes with doubts already swirling over whether the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) could organise polling nationwide on April 30 with anti-government fighters in control of a city on Baghdad’s doorstep.

Much is at stake in the election, as Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki bids for a third term with his security credentials thrown into question by a surge in violence to levels not seen since 2008, with 35 more people killed on Tuesday.

The nine-member IHEC board handed in its resignation in protest at what it said were conflicting rulings from parliament and the judiciary on the barring of would-be candidates for the election.

“The commission is today caught between two authorities — the legislative and the judicial — and the two have issued contradictory decisions,” IHEC spokesman Safa Al Mussawi told AFP.

“We are stuck in the middle, so we have decided to resign.”

An aide to IHEC chairman Sarbat Rashid told AFP that he backed the decision. An IHEC board member, who did not want to be identified, said the same.

“They are very frustrated with this judicial panel for the elections... excluding candidates,” a diplomatic source said on condition of anonymity.

“They are very unhappy with judicial interference, with political interference.”

The resignations still have to be approved by parliament, the source added.

Several candidates have been barred in recent weeks on the grounds of alleged ties to now executed dictator Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

But a greater source of frustration for the IHEC board has been the exclusion of scores of hopefuls on the basis of what critics say is a vague provision in Iraq’s electoral law that requires that parliamentary hopefuls be “of good reputation”.

Those barred, who include former finance minister Rafa Al Essawi, a Maliki opponent, have no obvious avenue of appeal against the judicial panel’s decision.

Parliament has meanwhile reportedly ruled that IHEC must not bar any candidates unless they have criminal convictions, a decision the IHEC spokesman said was at odds with that of the judicial panel.

‘Message not to interfere’

It was not immediately clear what impact the resignation of the IHEC board would have on next month’s election, which all major parties are agreed must take place on schedule.

One analyst said the resignations themselves were unlikely to disrupt the timetable.

“The election will go ahead on time, whatever the situation, because there is no way parliament will approve these resignations,” said Ihsan Al Shammari, a politics professor at Baghdad University.

“The resignations are a message to the two authorities... not to interfere in their work,” he said.

“The conflict between the two authorities has put pressure on IHEC... and forced them to present their resignations.”

The looming vote has been a factor in the rising bloodshed in recent months, analysts and diplomats say.

Maliki and other Shiite political leaders have been determined to be seen to take a hard line against militants, rather than reach out to the Sunni Arab minority in a bid to undercut long-term support for militancy.

But despite widely trumpeted operations against insurgents, bloodletting has continued, with more than 400 people killed so far this month, and upwards of 2,100 this year, according to an AFP tally.

On Tuesday alone, 35 people were killed nationwide, including eight who were killed in a gun attack on an army patrol and 15 others who were killed in car bombs in and around the capital.

The April 30 poll is also seen as opportunity to break years of political deadlock between Maliki and his opponents, which has resulted in little significant legislation being passed.

GAZA — The outgoing head of the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees urged Israel and Egypt on Tuesday to lift their border restrictions on the Hamas Islamist-run Gaza Strip.

Filippo Grandi, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Organisation (UNRWA), said Israel and Egypt had legitimate security concerns but that the plight of the 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza should also be taken into account.

“I think the world should not forget about the security of the people of Gaza,” he said. “Their security is worth the same as everybody else’s security so we appeal to the humanitarian sense of all.”

Israel tightened curbs on the movement of people and goods at the Gaza border in 2007 after Hamas, which won a Palestinian election a year earlier, wrested control of the enclave from forces loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel, which maintains a naval blockade of Gaza in a declared bid to prevent arms from reaching militants, has eased overland restrictions since 2010 but continues to block most exports from the territory. Palestinians say goods coming in through the lone commercial crossing with Israel meet only 35 to 50 per cent of their needs.

Egypt has meanwhile clamped down on smuggling tunnels in the Sinai desert that served as a commercial lifeline for Gaza.

The military-backed government that toppled the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s ideological kin, in Cairo last year deems the Palestinian faction a security threat, although Hamas insists its hostility is directed exclusively at Israel.

Israel’s blockade, Grandi said, is “illegal and must be lifted”. He said that while Israel had allowed importation of building materials for a limited number of UNRWA-run projects, another $150 million in new construction was still blocked.

“I also want to make a strong appeal for export to resume because the lack of export is the main reason for the poverty of Gaza,” said Grandi, who leaves his post next week.

Official Palestinian statistics put Gaza’s unemployment rate at nearly 40 per cent. UNRWA says 80 per cent of the population of Gaza receives aid.

Grandi, an Italian who was appointed UNRWA chief in 2010, also urged Egypt to open its Rafah crossing with Gaza, especially for those seeking medical treatment and students.

In the past 45 days, Egypt has opened the passage three times to allow some pilgrims to travel to Saudi Arabia.

ISTANBUL — A long-awaited compensation deal for Turkish victims of a deadly Israeli raid on a Gaza aid flotilla four years ago will soon be signed, Ankara said on Tuesday.

The May 2010 Israeli assault on the Turkish ship the Mavi Marmara while it was in international waters on its way to Gaza triggered a severe diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

“We have received a final agreement document from Israel,” Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc was quoted as saying by Hurriyet newspaper’s website.

He said that after next Sunday’s local elections, “our first job will be making sure the compensation is bound by a legal document”.

Talks on compensation over the nine Turks killed in the raid began in March 2013 after Israel extended a formal apology to Turkey in a breakthrough brokered by US President Barack Obama.

The amount of compensation to be paid was believed to be among the sticking points.

In February, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that Israel had offered $20 million in compensation to the families of those killed and wounded in the flotilla raid.

The local elections Sunday are seen as a test of the popularity of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been battling a damaging corruption scandal engulfing his inner circle since mid-December.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Some US intelligence analysts and Middle East security officials believe that a rocket shipment seized by the Israeli navy in the Red Sea this month was destined for the Egyptian Sinai and not for the Gaza Strip, as Israel says.

A US official and two non-Israeli regional sources said Israel appeared to be insisting on the Gaza destination in order to spare the military-backed interim Egyptian administration embarrassment as it struggles to impose order in the Sinai.

Israel has little compunction about drawing scrutiny to the rocket arsenals of Gaza’s governing Hamas Islamists and other armed Palestinian factions, with whom it has regularly clashed.

“Were the Israelis to say the rockets were going to Sinai, then they would also have had to say who in Sinai was going to receive the rockets,” one source told Reuters, adding that such a statement would draw attention to the insurgents resisting Egypt’s security sweeps in northern Sinai.

Israel says the Syrian-made M302 rockets and other munitions were hidden aboard the Panamanian-flagged Klos C while it docked in Iran. The ship was intercepted on March 5, en route to Sudan — where, Israel says, the arms would have been offloaded and trucked to Gaza through Egypt, a standard trafficking route.

Israel’s allegation, echoed by its Western allies, was dismissed by Iran and Hamas as a fabrication. Officials in Egypt declined comment, saying they knew nothing about the rockets.

Israel has been hazy in public about how the 5.5 metre-long M302s might have entered Gaza. The coastal enclave is under heavy Israeli surveillance, and Cairo has clamped down on the Egypt-Gaza frontier and the smuggling tunnels there.

Asked on the day of the ship seizure which Palestinian fighters were to have received the arms cache and how, Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said: “I don’t know, but it is clear this was meant to reach terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip... The route is well known and it seems that they tried to revive it.”

Rockets hard to smuggle

An Israeli military officer who took part in planning the naval interdiction told Reuters that, in the month before it happened, “not once did I hear anyone mention anything other than Gaza as the end-point for these weapons”.

A US official said Washington had confirmed the Syrian and Iranian provenance of the rockets, and believed they were to have been used against Israel. But half of US intelligence analysts thought Sinai, not Gaza, was the destination, the official said.

“You look at those things and it’s obvious they couldn’t have been slipped into Gaza,” the official said, adding that the M302s were not designed to be disassembled for easier smuggling.

Israel said it had also found 181 122mm mortar shells aboard the Klos C, and some 400,000 7.62-calibre bullets.

The US official agreed that the mortar shells were meant to go to Gaza, saying: “You can fit each of those in a backpack.” But the bullets, the US official said, may have been meant for another client elsewhere in Africa.

With their 160km  range, the M302s could have been launched from areas of Sinai well away from Israeli spotters along the Egyptian border, and struck Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

A regional security source said Israel would have kept Egypt informed about the seizure but that both countries would have kept the contacts discreet. Many Egyptians dislike their 1979 peace accord with Israel and would resent being reminded of Israeli cooperation in efforts to rein in militancy in the Sinai.

Egyptian military officers, visiting Israel two weeks ago as part of routine security meetings, were taken to Eilat to view the Klos C in dock, a source briefed on the visit said.

KUWAIT CITY –– Syria's opposition called for "sophisticated" arms at an Arab summit in Kuwait Tuesday while Saudi Arabia stressed the need for a change in military balance to "end the impasse".

UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, however, insisted on the need for a "political solution" to the three-year conflict, urging an "end to the supply of arms to all parties".

Opposition Syrian National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba repeated calls on the international community to supply rebels with "sophisticated weapons" as the two-day summit opened.

"I do not ask you for a declaration of war," said Jarba, urging Arab leaders to put pressure on the international community to comply with pledges to supply arms.

Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, whose country is a key backer of the Syrian rebellion against President Bashar Assad, said the international community was "betraying" the opposition by failing to arm them and leaving them as "easy prey".

A solution to the conflict, in which regime forces have recently made significant advances, requires a "change in the balance on the ground to end the impasse", he said.

National Coalition spokesman Louay Safi said rebels needed urgently "anti-aircraft missiles" to fend barrel bombs which activists say regime forces have been raining down on fighters and civilians alike.

The conflict in Syria, which in mid-March entered a fourth year, has killed more than 140,000 people and displaced millions.

Jarba said a decision not to hand over Syria's seat in the Arab League to the opposition sends a wrong message to Assad, telling him to continue "to kill".

"Let me say quite frankly that keeping Syria's seat empty... sends a clear message to Assad that he can kill and that the seat will wait for him," he said.

The Syria government's brutal repression of protests which erupted in March 2011 resulted in its suspension from the 22-member Cairo-based Arab League.

Its seat was allocated to the National Coalition at last year's Arab summit in Qatar, but has not been handed over because the opposition must meet legal requirements, said Arab League chief Nabil El Arabi.

Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, in his address to the summit that wraps up Wednesday, accused the Syrian government of "buying time" by "pretending to accept a political solution."

While the Syrian conflict is taking centre stage at the summit, a regional rift over Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has been kept off the agenda.

The dispute pits Qatar against Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has apparently affected the level of summit, the first to be hosted by Kuwait.

Kuwait said 13 heads of state were attending the meeting, with low-profile representation from its Gulf partners.

Kuwait Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah told the summit that Arab rifts are threatening Arab aspirations and insisted that "we are required to resolve these disputes... and achieve unity."

Efforts to settle the inter-Arab rift appear to have been placed on the back burner, with officials ruling out any compromise being struck in Kuwait.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy told reporters it was not possible to forge a compromise with Qatar during the summit because "the wound is too deep".

On the Palestinian issue, Arab leaders are expected to call for $100 million in monthly aid for the Palestinian Authority and to reject demands by Israel that Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, fresh from talks with US President Barack Obama in Washington last week, was to brief his Arab counterparts during the summit.

DAMASCUS — Syrian rebels have launched a fierce offensive against President Bashar Assad’s troops in four northern provinces, aiming to reverse a string of defeats, an NGO and rebels said Monday.

The offensive follows several victories for the regime, most recently in former rebel bastion Yabrud, in the Qalamun region along the border with Lebanon.

On Monday, the rebels and their jihadist ally Al Nusra Front seized a key area on the border with Turkey, gaining full control of the Kasab frontier crossing, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The takeover came even as the air force bombarded rebel positions in Kasab, in Latakia province, the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect, a day after Turkey shot down a Syrian warplane in the area.

“It is clear that the opposition factions launched a fierce offensive in northern Syria after the battle for Qalamun,” said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.

The assault has focused on Latakia, Idlib and Aleppo provinces, as well as in the north and west of Hama province.

“The rebel fighters have advanced in all these areas, while the regime has clearly retreated,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

In Idlib province of northwest Syria, rebels have in recent days taken over a string of 15 army checkpoints.

In Aleppo, the rebels have advanced in the city and in parts of the countryside.

In Hama’s Morek, which lies on a key supply route linking the centre of Syria to Aleppo, rebels have fought off repeated attempts by the army to break through their lines of defence, said the observatory.

In Latakia province, opposition fighters launched a surprise offensive on Friday.

Rebels say the advances are connected.

“After the battle for the coast [Latakia] began, the army withdrew many of its fighters from Idlib to go fight there,” said Colonel Afif Al Suleimani, an officer who defected from the army and now heads Idlib’s rebel Military Council.

“This opened a gap here in Idlib and we took advantage of it, and went on the offensive,” he said.

“We are three provinces, but we are neighbours, and many of the factions have fighters on more than one front. So we help each other,” Suleimani told AFP via the Internet.

“There are many ties between us, and yes, we can speak of a joint offensive that has opened up.”

‘Now we only have one enemy’

According to Ibrahim Al Idelbi, a rebel spokesman, a key factor behind opposition factions taking the initiative was the withdrawal around two weeks ago of the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from most of northern Syria.

A broad coalition of moderate and Islamist rebels has been fighting ISIL since
January 3. Thousands of fighters on the two sides have been killed.

ISIL and Syria’s rebels were once allied in the fight against Assad, but the extremists’ quest for hegemony and its atrocities turned the rest of the opposition against them.

Most of ISIL’s fighters are now in Raqa, further east.

“ISIL’s exit from the area is a key factor in the advances. Now, rather than having two enemies, the rebels have one [Assad’s regime],” Idelbi told AFP.

“And the roads are now open for the rebels between the countrysides of Latakia, Idlib and northern Hama, opening up supply routes. There is a whole triangle, a section of Syria, that has been liberated,” he said.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced 529 supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to death on Monday after just two hearings, in the largest mass sentencing in the country’s modern history.

The shock verdict by the court in the southern province of Minya came amid a sweeping crackdown on Morsi’s supporters since his overthrow by the army last July.

Washington said it was deeply concerned by the death sentences, questioning the fairness of proceedings against so many defendants lasting just two days.

But Egypt’s army-installed interim government defended the court’s handling of the case, insisting that the sentences had been handed down only “after careful study” and were subject to appeal.

The defendants who were sentenced to death are part of a larger group of more than 1,200 alleged Islamists accused of killing two policemen and rioting on August 14, after police killed hundreds of protesters while dispersing two Cairo protest camps.

Of the 529, only 153 are in custody. The rest were tried in their absence and have the right to a retrial if they turn themselves in.

Another 17 defendants were acquitted.

The judgement can be appealed at the court of cassation, which would probably order a new trial or reduce the sentences, legal expert Gamal Eid said.

“This sentencing is a catastrophe and a travesty and a scandal that will affect Egypt for many years,” said Eid, who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.

Washington questioned how the court could have given the defendants a fair hearing in a trial that spanned just two days — an opening session on Saturday and Monday’s sentencing.

“While appeals are possible, it simply does not seem possible that a fair review of evidence and testimony consistent with international standards could be accomplished with over 529 defendants after a two-day trial,” a State Department official said.

Defence counsel Mohamed Tousson charged that the judge had rushed to sentencing on Monday after being angered by a lawyer’s request for his recusal at Saturday’s opening hearing.

“He got very angry, and adjourned the trial for sentencing,” Tousson said. “It’s a huge violation of defendants’ rights.”

The foreign ministry issued a statement defending the court’s handling of the trial, saying that the sentences had been “issued by an independent court after careful study of the case”.

It said the Egyptian judiciary was “entirely independent and is not influenced in any way by the executive branch of government”, and emphasised that the defendants had the right of appeal.

A second group of about 700 defendants, including Mohamed Badie, the supreme guide of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, is due in the dock on Tuesday.

The Muslim Brotherhood said the death sentences were yet “another indication that the corrupt judiciary is being used by the coup commanders to suppress the Egyptian revolution and install a brutal regime.”

At least 1,400 people have been killed in the crackdown on Morsi’s supporters and thousands more arrested, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

Morsi is himself currently on trial in three different cases, including one for inciting the killing of protesters outside one of the presidential palaces while he was in office.

The army removed Egypt’s first freely elected president after a single year in power following mass protests demanding his resignation.

‘Baseless charges’ 

The ensuing crackdown has also targeted prominent activists of the 2011 uprising against veteran president Hosni Mubarak, as well as journalists.

A group of journalists working for Al Jazeera television was back in court on Monday for the third hearing in their trial on charges of spreading false news and aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.

Award-winning Australian reporter Peter Greste told reporters from the caged dock that he and his colleagues were being held on “baseless charges”.

“We haven’t seen any evidence in the court that possibly justify the charges or our imprisonment,” said Greste, dressed in a white prison uniform.

“We spent three months in prison based on baseless charges.”

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Twenty-seven people, most of them civilians, have been killed in 12 days of clashes between pro- and anti-Damascus fighters in Lebanon’s second city Tripoli, a security source told AFP Monday.

Snipers from both sides were still deployed in flashpoint areas of the northern port city, as the fighting subsided on Monday for the first time in nearly two weeks.

Tripoli has seen intense sectarian clashes since the war in neighbouring Syria erupted three years ago, with gunmen from the Sunni district of Bab Al Tebbaneh battling fighters in the Alawite area of Jabal Mohsen.

The fighting killed 27 people and wounded 134 people, the security source said, updating an earlier toll after a civilian died of his injuries.

The dead were 19 residents of Sunni Bab Al Tebbaneh, including six fighters, and seven residents of Jabal Mohsen, including three combatants.

In addition, a soldier was killed, said the source, adding that two children and two disabled people were among the civilians killed.

On Sunday, amid a relative calm, the army raided several homes, hunting for militants.

Shops and schools in the flashpoint neighbourhoods remained closed on Monday, but they reopened across the rest of the city for the first time in days.

The international highway from Tripoli to Syria was also reopened Monday, but roads linking the city’s warring neighbourhoods remain sealed off.

The army has been deployed in Tripoli for several weeks to try to bring peace to the flashpoint districts, but troops have repeatedly come under fire.

Lawmakers from the city have called the latest round of fighting “a war of attrition”.

Dominated by Damascus for nearly 30 years, Lebanon is deeply divided over the war in neighbouring Syria. Hizbollah and its allies support President Bashar Assad, and the Sunni-led opposition backs the revolt.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM —  A majority of Palestinians would support extending peace talks with Israel beyond an April deadline, but only in exchange for the release of additional prisoners, according to a poll published Monday.

Without this condition, most Palestinians would reject extending the faltering negotiations, which have achieved no apparent progress in the nearly nine months since US Secretary of State John Kerry brought the two sides to the table.

Some 65 per cent of 1,200 Palestinian adults interviewed this month by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research would support talks running to the end of the year “if Israel agrees to release more Palestinian prisoners”.

Israel pledged, when talks began in July, to release 104 veteran Palestinian prisoners in four batches, in exchange for the Palestinians refraining from pursuing legal action against Israel in international courts.

But after the release of a total of 78 inmates so far, Israeli Cabinet ministers have warned that the remaining prisoners will not be freed on March 29 unless the Palestinians agree to extend the talks beyond their April 29 deadline.

Palestinians have rejoiced at the releases, seeing the inmates’ imprisonment as political, but Israelis have criticised the government for freeing men who were convicted of killing Israeli civilians.

Should there be no releases beyond the 104 already agreed, 55 per cent of Palestinians would reject carrying on the talks, the survey said.

And a narrow majority of 51 per cent would support talks continuing if Israel froze its settlement construction in the occupied West Bank — a key sticking point that has angered Palestinian negotiators, and derailed the last round of talks in 2010.

The poll was conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between March 20-22, and had a 3 per cent error margin.