Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli forces arrested five Jews suspected of trying to sacrifice a goat at Jerusalem’s highly sensitive Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem Monday as the Jewish Passover holiday begins, a spokesperson said.

The five “extreme rightwing Jews” were dragging the goat towards the flashpoint compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, when they were stopped and taken into custody, security spokesperson Luba Samri said in a statement.

The incident took place as the seven-day holiday, in which traditionally a lamb or a kid is sacrificed, was to begin at sunset.

The compound, in the walled Old City, houses the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques, and is the third holiest shrine in Islam.

It is also venerated by Jews as the site where King Herod’s temple stood before it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, and is where the priests of antiquity would have ritually reenacted the first slaughter.

Clashes frequently break out there between Palestinians and Israeli security forces.

Muslims are intensely sensitive to any perceived threat to the status of the compound and many believe Jews are determined to build a new temple on the wide esplanade.

Jews are not allowed to pray on the Temple Mount.

Jewish fringe groups have vowed to build a third Temple, but Israeli political and religious authorities have repeatedly dismissed the idea.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — An Israeli was killed and two others wounded in a shooting near the southern West Bank city of Hebron on Monday, the army said.

“Fire was opened at Israeli civilian vehicles on route 35, near Hebron, and we’re conducting widespread searches for the perpetrators... an Israeli civilian was killed in the attack,” an army spokeswoman told AFP.

A separate army statement added that two other Israelis were also wounded.

Israeli military radio said the victim was a man, and his wife and one of their children were those injured.

It was unclear if they were Israeli settlers residing in the occupied West Bank.

The flashpoint city of Hebron, home to nearly 200,000 Palestinians, also comprises some 80 settler housing units in the centre of town housing about 700 Jews who live under Israeli army protection.

The incident took place as the seven-day Jewish Passover holiday began.

In September, an Israeli soldier was shot dead by a suspected Palestinian gunman in the centre of Hebron during the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel is holding secret talks with some Arab states that do not recognise it, looking to establish diplomatic ties based on a common fear of Iran, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Monday.

Amongst the countries he was in contact with were Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Lieberman told newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth — the first such disclosure by a senior Israeli official.

The two nations swiftly denied the existence of any talks with Israel.

Both these states, along with most other Arab nations, have traditionally been highly hostile towards Israel, which has only signed peace deals with two neighbours — Egypt and Jordan.

However, anti-Israeli sentiment was being superseded by a growing concern over Iran’s nuclear programme, Tehran’s regional allies, and the menace of Islamist militancy, Lieberman said.

“For the first time there is an understanding there that the real threat is not Israel, the Jews or Zionism. It is Iran, global jihad, [Lebanese Shiite guerrilla group] Hizbollah and Al Qaeda,” the foreign minister said.

“There are contacts, there are talks, but we are very close to the stage in which within a year or 18 months it will no longer be secret, it will be conducted openly,” added Lieberman, who is a far rightist in the coalition government.

Lieberman said he was in touch with “moderate” Arabs - a term Israelis often use for Sunni states in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East that align with US interests. He also said he would have no problem visiting Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

“I have spent more than a few years of meetings and talks with them. As far as they are concerned, there is only one red rag and that is Iran,” he said.

A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said: “There are no ties or talks with Israel at any level.” In Kuwait, Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Khaled Al Jarallah said: “It is not true, we don’t have these kind of talks.”

Full relations

Yedioth paraphrased Lieberman as saying some new Israeli-Arab peace accords would be signed in 2019.

“I’m certain that by then we will have a situation in which we have full diplomatic relations with most of the moderate Arab states. And you can count on my word,” he said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long hinted that Israel and the Gulf states share a similar goal in halting Iran’s nuclear programme, saying they all saw a mortal threat in its ambitious atomic drive.

Iran denies that it is planning to build nuclear weapons.

Senior Israeli officials have also said that like themselves, moderate Sunni states are worried that Washington was not taking a tough enough line with Tehran.

However, analysts have scoffed at the idea that ties between Israel and much of the Arab world could be normalised while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained unresolved.

US-brokered peace talks between the two are floundering, with no indication that a resolution is anywhere in sight.

“To Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the cost of open relations with Israel at this time may be higher than the benefit, given the position of the Arab street,” Israeli think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies, said in a report in December.

Lieberman, who has worked hard in recent months to soften his hardline international image, suggested Arab nations were as eager as Israel to be open about their shared interests.

“I think that they too are stewing in their own juice and reaching an awareness that there will be no choice but to move from the secret stage of the dialogue between us to the open stage of the talks,” he said.

RIYADH — A Saudi Arabian court on Sunday jailed 13 men to sentences ranging from one to 10 years for aiding and financing militants fighting abroad, conspiring inside Saudi Arabia and harbouring wanted suspects, state news agency SPA reported on Monday.

Other charges for which the 13 were convicted included money laundering, bribery and possession of illegal weapons. They were all given travel bans to come into force after their sentences finish. Another seven men were acquitted, SPA reported.

Saudi courts have sentenced hundreds of convicted militants to prison terms in recent months as they work to overcome a long backlog of cases related to a militant campaign last decade that killed hundreds.

The security forces detained thousands of people after the bombings and shootings started in 2003 who were accused of security offences, including joining militant groups, and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saudi and international human rights groups have also accused the government of using its crackdown on militants to detain peaceful dissidents in the conservative Islamic kingdom, something the authorities deny.

In February King Abdullah issued a royal decree imposing prison terms of three to 20 years on any Saudi who travels overseas to fight and of five to 30 years on any who gives moral or material support to groups the government considers extremist.

The move reflected the government’s fears that the civil war in Syria, where many rebels fighting against the government are militants, coupled with Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, will inspire radicalism inside the kingdom.

The world’s top oil exporter is a leading supporter of both the Syrian rebellion against President Bashar Al Assad and of Egypt’s military rulers.

JEDDAH — A foreigner has died from MERS in the western Saudi city of Jeddah, where authorities have sought to calm fears over the spreading respiratory illness, the health ministry said Monday.

The death of the 70-year-old man brought the toll of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)  in the most-affected country to 69 fatalities. Four new cases of infection were registered, bringing the kingdom’s total to 194, the ministry said.

It did not disclose the man’s nationality.

Last week panic over the spread of MERS among medical staff in Jeddah had caused a temporary closure of an emergency room at a main hospital, prompting a visit by Health Minister Abdullah Al Rabiah aimed at reassuring an anxious public.

Rabiah briefed the Cabinet on Monday following his visit to hospitals in Jeddah over the weekend.

“The situation concerning the coronavirus is reassuring,” a government statement said following the meeting.

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

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said Friday that it had been told of 212 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS infection worldwide, of which 88 have proved fatal.

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 MERS, for which there is no known vaccine.

A recent study 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.

But the Saudi health minister warned against assuming that camels were behind the virus, insisting in remarks published by Makkah daily on Monday that “one should not jump to conclusions”.

“Saudi hospitals did not deal with a single case of infection that involved contact with the animal,” he said.

His statement appeared in contrast with an announcement by his ministry on November 11, which said that a camel became the first animal to test positive in “preliminary laboratory checks”.

The ministry said at the time that the camel was owned by a person diagnosed with the disease.

CAIRO — Egypt’s former military chief on Monday took the final formal step to run in next month’s presidential election, submitting to the election commission eight times the number of signatures required, his campaign said in a statement.

Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi, a retired field marshal, did not deliver the 200,000 signatures in person. His campaign said a legal adviser, Mohammed Bahaa Abou Shaqah, delivered them.

Photos released by the campaign and footage aired on local TV networks showed security guards delivering white boxes with an image of the retired soldier plastered on the side along with the name of the province from which it said the signatures were obtained.

Officials from the election commission could not be reached to confirm the campaign’s statement.

It is mandatory for any presidential hopeful to secure 25,000 signatures from at least 15 of the nation’s 27 provinces in order to run in the May 26-27 vote. Sisi, who led the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi last July, was the first hopeful to submit the signatures.

Sisi’s likely chief rival in the election is leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, who finished a strong third in the first round of the last presidential election, in June 2012. Morsi won the race in a run-off against second-placed Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister to serve under ousted president Hosni Mubarak.

Sisi’s campaign says more signatures continue to pour into its Cairo headquarters, something it described as a “unique example of support and national backing” for the 59-year-old career soldier.

The US and British-trained Sisi is the most likely winner of next month’s vote. He has enjoyed nationwide support in the nine months since he ousted Morsi. Many Egyptians see him as a potential savior, delivering the nation of some 90 million people from its seemingly countless woes.

Sisi, however, has yet to announce an election programme that clearly spells out what he intends to do to revive the economy, restore security and save the vital tourism sector from its slump.

The two-day balloting is the second phase in a political blueprint announced by Sisi the day he ousted Morsi. The first was the drafting and adoption by referendum in January of a new constitution. The presidential ballot will be followed by a parliamentary election later this year.

On Monday, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said the European Union would be sending an electoral observation mission for the May 26-27 vote.

“My big message to Egypt is and always was the same: this is a strong partnership; we want the people of Egypt to move forward, we do want these elections to herald the beginning of the next phase of life in Egypt,” she told reporters in Luxembourg about her visit last week to Cairo.

She added, however, that she had expressed her concern in Egypt about a recent court ruling that sentenced more than 500 Morsi supporters to death, and the jailing of activists and journalists. Egyptian authorities say the sentence is likely to be overturned on appeal.

The run-up to the election has been marred by continuing street protests by Morsi supporters, who clash nearly daily with security forces. Egyptian troops and police, meanwhile, continue to battle Islamic militants in the strategic northern part of the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere.

In the latest violence, a Morsi supporter was killed on Monday with a gunshot to the head in clashes at Cairo University between pro-and anti-Morsi students, according to a security official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, identified the student as Mohammed Adel. Two local journalists were also injured in clashes between security forces and students supporting Morsi, the official added.

Beside Cairo university, there were clashes also on Monday between Islamist students and security forces at the capital’s Islamic Al Azhar University as well as campuses in the Nile Delta city of Zagazig and the southern city of Assiut, according to the interior ministry, which is in charge of police.

Nearly 30 students were injured and 17 injured in the clashes in Assiut, a hotbed of Islamists some 400 Kilometres south of Cairo.

At least 16,000 Morsi supporters have been detained and hundreds killed in the nine months since the military takeover. Morsi himself and most leaders of his Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group from which he hails, are on trial on charges that range from espionage and incitement of murder to corruption and conspiring with foreign groups. Some of the charges carry the death penalty.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israel has carried out a new land appropriation in the occupied West Bank, the Haaretz daily said on Sunday, in a move that could complicate efforts to extend troubled peace talks with the Palestinians.

Haaretz said the defence ministry declared nearly 100 hectares of territory in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc just south of Jerusalem "state land".

Asked by Reuters about the report, the ministry declined to comment but said it might have something to say in the coming days.

The land appropriation, the left-leaning newspaper said, was the largest in years and could eventually lead to the expansion of several settlements and authorisation of a settler outpost built without Israeli government permission in 2001.

The measure, which falls short of annexing the land to Israel, is based on an Israeli interpretation of an Ottoman-era law that allowed the confiscation of tracts that had not been planted or cultivated for several years in a row.

Haaretz said the heads of nearby Palestinian villages that claimed the land as theirs were informed of the move last week and have 45 days to appeal.

It was not immediately clear whether the reported appropriation was part of sanctions that Israel has begun to impose in response to the April 1 signing by Palestinians of 15 international conventions and agreements during the current crisis in US-brokered peace negotiations.

Mohammed Shtayyeh, a senior official in the Palestinian negotiating team, said the move showed Israel was more concerned with expanding its control of West Bank land than in peace talks.

"[The Israeli government] will do everything possible in order to turn its occupation into annexation of our land. The decision ... is simply a reflection of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's will to strengthen settlements and bury the two-state solution," he said in a statement.

Israeli optimism

Speaking before the Haaretz report appeared, Israel's chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni said on the YNet news site that she is optimistic the statehood negotiations will be extended beyond the original April 29 deadline for a deal.

“I believe that we are close enough to a decision on the part of both leaderships, encouraged by the Americans, to continue the negotiations,” she said.

Livni has been meeting her Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat in an intensive push over the past few days to try to salvage the talks.

Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that Israel’s publication on April 1 of a tender for 708 housing units for settlers in East Jerusalem was the proximate cause for the near collapse of the talks, which began in July.

Israel’s anti-settlement Peace Now movement said on its website that at least 90 of the 120 Jewish settlements built in the occupied West Bank since its capture in a 1967 war are on “state land”. Most countries regard the settlements as illegal.

Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and fear settlements will deny them a viable country. Israel cites historical and Biblical links to the West Bank and Jerusalem and says Gush Etzion is one of the enclaves it intends to keep in any future peace deal.

Citing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ signing of UN human rights conventions, Israel said on Wednesday it was limiting its contacts with Palestinian officials, although Livni could continue to meet negotiators.

Announcing another sanction a day later, an Israeli official said Israel would deduct debt payments from tax transfers which the Palestinian Authority routinely receives, and limit the self-rule government’s deposits in Israeli banks.

For his part, Abbas has accused Israel of violating a commitment to release two dozen prisoners at the end of March, including Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis, when the negotiations resumed. This is the last group of 104 prisoners Israel pledged to free as a confidence-building measure.

BAGHDAD — Bombings targeting security forces in northern Iraq killed at least 16 people Sunday, authorities said, as the country prepares for a crucial election later this month.

In the deadliest attack, an explosives-laden parked car exploded as a joint Iraqi army and police patrol passed through a busy commercial area in Mosul, killing five civilians and five security personnel, a police officer said. He said the blast wounded 12.

A medical official confirmed the figures. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to release the information.

Mosul is located about 360 kilometres northwest of Baghdad.

Hours earlier, a suicide car bomber drove his vehicle into a security checkpoint in the northern town of Dibis, killing six people and wounding 15, police chief Col. Bestoon Rasheed said. Civilians were among the victims, but a breakdown of the casualties was not immediately available.

Dibis is located near the city of Kirkuk, 290 kilometres north of Baghdad.

Violence has escalated in Iraq over the past year, with 2013 seeing the highest death toll since the worst sectarian bloodletting in 2007, according to the United Nations figures. More than 8,800 people were killed in violence last year.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but suicide bombings and well coordinated attacks are a hallmark of an Al Qaeda’s breakaway branch that operates in Iraq, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Sunni Insurgent groups have escalated attacks across the country since last year in bid to undermine the Shiite-led government.

The attacks happened just weeks before parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held on April 30, the first such vote since US forces left Iraq. There will be no voting in parts of the western Anbar province, where security forces are clashing with Islamic militants and fighters who control the provincial capital, Ramadi, and nearly all of the nearby city of Fallujah.

TRIPOLI — Libya's interim prime minister handed his resignation to parliament on Sunday, just one month into the job, saying gunmen had tried to attack his family.

Abdullah Al Thinni's resignation adds to the growing chaos in Libya, where the government has struggled to control brigades of former rebels nearly three years after the fall of Muammar Qadhafi.

The General National Congress (GNC), the country's parliament, has not yet officially recognised Thinni's resignation and will decide what to do at its next session on Tuesday, a GNC spokesman said.

Thinni said he would stay in his post until the GNC selects a new prime minister.

“We are meeting now and we’re looking for someone to replace him,” Mohamed Ali Abdallah, head of the GNC’s planning and budget committee, told Reuters.

In his resignation letter, Thinni said he and his family had been victims of a “cowardly attack” and he could not “accept to see any violence because of my position”.

“I have decided therefore to present my apologies as I cannot accept this temporary position,” the letter said, without giving details about the incident.

Ahmed Lamin, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, said no one had been hurt in the attack, which he described as a “near miss” outside Thinni’s family home.

Unenviable position

The post of interim prime minister is becoming difficult to fill. A suitable candidate must be able to bridge deep political divides in a parliament inter-laced with militia rivalries.

With no real national army, OPEC member Libya is struggling with its transition to democracy as the brigades of former rebels who once fought Qadhafi refuse to disarm and often challenge the state’s authority.

Thinni was appointed in March after the GNC voted out his predecessor, Ali Zeidan who had failed to end a standoff with rebels who were occupying vital oil ports.

The final blow was Zeidan’s failure to stop a tanker from illegally loading crude oil at one of the blocked ports.

Thinni’s government reached an agreement to reopen two ports, but the return of steady oil revenues is not a given.

The two largest ports, Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, remain closed pending negotiations over the division of the country’s oil wealth.

The attack on Thinni’s family is not the first time that a prime minister has been threatened.

Zeidan, who fled to Europe after he was removed from his post, was briefly abducted from his hotel by a militia last year. He often complained of being unable to govern because of political rivalries and pressure from militias.

DAMASCUS — The US ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday that reports of a poison gas attack in a rural village north of Damascus were so far "unsubstantiated", adding that the United States was trying to establish what really happened before it considers a response.

Both sides in Syria's civil war blamed each other for the alleged attack that reportedly injured scores of people Friday amid an ongoing international effort to rid the country of chemical weapons.

The details of what happened in Kfar Zeita, an opposition-held village in Hama province some 200 kilometres north of Damascus, remain murky. Online videos posted by rebel activists showed pale-faced men, women and children gasping for breath at what appeared to be a field hospital. They suggested an affliction by some kind of poison — and yet another clouded incident where both sides blame each other in a conflict that activists say has killed more than 150,000 people with no end in sight.

“We are trying to run this down,” said Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”.

“So far it’s unsubstantiated, but we’ve shown, I think, in the past that we will do everything in our power to establish what has happened and then consider possible steps in response,” she said.

In the Syrian capital, Syrian President Bashar Assad said the conflict in Syria was shifting in the government’s favour.

“This is a turning point in the crisis, both militarily in terms of the army’s continuous achievements in the war against terror or socially in terms of national reconciliation and growing awareness of the true aims of the attack on the country,” state-run Syrian television quoted Assad as saying. He spoke to a group of students and teachers from Damascus University.

His comments follow a string of government triumphs against rebels, particularly around the Syrian capital. Assad’s forces also have struck local ceasefire agreements with the opposition in a number of neighbourhoods, where weary rebels have turned over their weapons in exchange for an easing of suffocating blockades.

Opposition groups, including the main Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, said the poison gas attack at Kfar Zeita hurt dozens of people, though it did not identify the gas used. State-run Syrian television blamed members of Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front rebel group for the attack, saying they used chlorine gas to kill two people and injured more than 100. It did not say how it confirmed chlorine was used.

Chlorine, one of the most commonly manufactured chemicals in the US, is used to purify drinking water. But as a gas, it can be deadly.

The videos were reminiscent — albeit on a much smaller scale — of an August 21 chemical attack near the capital, Damascus, that killed hundreds of people.

The US and its allies blamed the Syrian government for that attack, which crossed a “red line” that President Barack Obama had said would bring harsh consequences. The attack nearly sparked Western air strikes before a negotiated diplomatic settlement saw Assad’s government agree to give up its chemical weapons. Damascus denied the charges and blamed rebels of staging the incident.

About half the weapons have been removed from Syria so far. The Syrian government has missed several deadlines, blaming the delays on security concerns.

The opposition also has claimed other, limited use of chemical weapons or poisonous gas attacks near Damascus in recent days.

Power’s comments came as heavy fighting raged Sunday across many parts of the country. In the war-shattered northern city of Aleppo, activists said at least 29 people were killed over the weekend.

The Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 16 rebels were among those who died in the overnight combat. At least 13 civilians also were killed when government aircraft dropped barrel bombs on the city’s rebel-held districts.

Another activist group, the Syria-based Local Coordination Committees, said Assad’s warplanes launched fresh air strikes there on Sunday.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest urban centre and its one-time commercial hub, has been a key front in the civil war. The fighting has been in a stalemate for months.

Both activist groups also reported air strikes on rebel positions in a village in the oil-rich Deir Al Zour province near the Iraqi border. The observatory said the strikes killed at least four people and wounded scores.