Region

CAIRO — Israel and Egypt plan to boost gas exports to Europe under an agreement signed during a Cairo visit on Wednesday by the European Commission president as the bloc seeks to wean itself off Russian gas.

Ursula von der Leyen also pledged relief worth 100 million euros ($104 million) for food security in Egypt, which has been reeling from grain shortages as a result of the Ukraine war.

"Russia's war against Ukraine has exposed our European dependency on Russian fossil fuels, and we want to get rid of this dependency," von der Leyen told a joint press conference with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

"We want to diversify to trustworthy suppliers, and Egypt is a trustworthy partner."

She had vowed on Tuesday, during a visit to Israel, to confront Russia for its use of fossil fuels to "blackmail" European countries.

The memorandum of understanding on gas exports between Egypt, Israel and the EU was signed at the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, the Egyptian petroleum ministry said.

Under a landmark $15 billion deal in 2020, Israel already exports gas from an offshore field to Egypt, where it is liquefied and shipped to European countries.

But a significant increase in gas exports from Israel via Egypt would require major long-term infrastructure investments.

Von der Leyen also said Egypt had sun and wind power, "the energies of the future", in abundance, and that the EU and Egypt jointly exploring them was in "our common interest".

Food security 

Von der Leyen pledged "immediate relief of 100 million euros" to support food security in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, which has relied on Russia and Ukraine for over 80 per cent of its wheat.

“It is very important that here we stand together, globally, to manage this food security crisis, that we find solutions that are fair for everybody, that we look at the distribution of grain, for example, worldwide, and that we really have an emphasis on vulnerable countries,” von der Leyen said.

She also pledged 3 billion euros in “agriculture and nutrition, water and sanitation programmes over the next years here in the region”.

“The European Union is very interested in investing in the local food production,” she said.

“It is so important for us that in the region, the production of food is improved and increased, and thus the dependency from other regions is reduced,” she said.

“Over time this will ensure stable supplies of quality and affordable food for all... Egypt will be at the heart of this major shift.”

Sisi said von der Leyen’s first official visit builds on the recent “intense momentum” of Egyptian relations with the EU.

During her Israel visit, von der Leyen had accused Moscow of deliberately cutting off gas supplied to European countries “in retaliation for our support to Ukraine”.

“This is a big step forward in the energy supply to Europe, but also for Egypt to become a regional energy hub,” she said in Cairo.

Egypt will host the UN COP27 climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh in November.

Later Wednesday, von der Leyen travelled to Jordan, where she met with King Abdullah II, calling Jordan “an essential partner for the EU” in comments on Twitter.

“You have a crucial role to play in the stability and prosperity of the region,” she said.

DOHA — Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro met on Wednesday with Qatar's Emir Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani in the gas-rich Gulf nation, his fifth stop of a regional tour.

The two heads of state discussed "developing relations of friendship and prospects of joint cooperation" between the two countries, the Qatar News Agency said.

The talks focused in particular on "energy, the economy, investment, agriculture and tourism", the agency added.

The emir said on Twitter that the two "discussed ways of strengthening cooperation between our two countries in many areas for the good and well-being of our two peoples".

Maduro said on Twitter that "we work for the construction of a cooperation map for the welfare of the Venezuelan people and for the union and brotherhood among nations".

The Venezuelan leader arrived in Qatar on Tuesday.

His trip was scheduled to last two days, diplomatic sources said.

Maduro was in Iran at the weekend, and signed a 20-year cooperation agreement with the Islamic republic.

Iran and Venezuela are both members of the OPEC alliance of oil producers and both are subject to US sanctions.

Qatar is a major US ally. But in 2014, Maduro said that Qatari banks were helping with substantial loans as his South American nation, which depends on oil for revenues, went into economic free fall.

Maduro was in Kuwait on Monday and had earlier been in Algeria and Turkey.

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — Four out of five children in Gaza suffer from emotional distress, Save the Children said Wednesday, 15 years after Israel slapped a strict blockade on the Palestinian territory. 

Israel imposed the measure in June 2007, as fighters of the Islamist Hamas movement took control of the densely populated enclave. Israel, and Egypt, continue to severely restrict the flow of people and materials in and out. 

In a report called “Trapped”, Britain-based Save the Children said the mental health of Gazan children has continued to deteriorate.

Since 2018, the number reporting symptoms of “depression, grief and fear,” had risen from 55 per cent to 80 per cent, the report said.

Save the Children’s director for the occupied Palestinian territories, Jason Lee, said: “The children we spoke to for this report described living in a perpetual state of fear, worry, sadness and grief, waiting for the next round of violence to erupt, and feeling unable to sleep or concentrate.

“The physical evidence of their distress — bedwetting, loss of ability to speak or to complete basic tasks — Daesh shocking and should serve as a wakeup call to the international community,” he added. 

Children make up nearly half of Gaza’s population of 2.1 million. Around 800,000 young people in the territory who have “never known life without the blockade,” Save the Children said. 

 ‘Open-air prison’

Israel insists the blockade Daesh necessary to protect its citizens from Hamas, a group blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by much of the West. 

Israel has fought four wars with Hamas since 2007, most recently in May 2021. 

Over the past 12 months, Israel has granted more work permits for Gazans seeking better paid jobs inside the Israel. It has also relaxed some restrictions on the flow of goods in and out of the territory. 

But the blockade remains broadly unchanged, with Palestinians generally barred from leaving Gaza through the Erez crossing to Israel.

Gazans also face huge obstacles exiting through the Rafah crossing to Egypt. 

In a statement marking the anniversary of the blockade, Human Rights Watch said that “Israel, with Egypt’s help, has turned Gaza into an open-air prison”.

HRW’s director for Israel and Palestine, Omar Shakir, told AFP: “Young people face the brunt of [the blockade] because they don’t know of a Gaza before the closure.

“Their horizons are forcibly narrowed to a 40 by 11 kilometre strip of land and that prevents them from the chance to interact and engage with the world,” Shakir said. 

Raqqa, Syria — Noura Al Khalif married a Daesh group supporter and then wound up without her husband in a Syrian camp viewed by many as the last surviving pocket of the “caliphate”. 

The 31-year-old woman has been back in her hometown outside the northern city of Raqqa for three years but she Daesh struggling to shake off the stigma of having lived in Al Hol camp.

“Most of my neighbours call me an Daesh supporter,” she told AFP from her father’s house near Raqqa, where she now lives with her two children.

“I just want to forget but people insist on dragging me back, and ever since I left Al Hol I haven’t felt either financial or emotional comfort.” 

Al Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, still houses about 56,000 people, mostly Syrians and Iraqis, some of whom maintain links with Daesh. 

About 10,000 are foreigners, including relatives of Daesh fighters, and observers are increasingly worried what was meant as a temporary detention facility Daesh turning into a jihadist breeding ground.

Most of Al Hol’s residents are people who fled or surrendered during the dying days of Daesh’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in early 2019.

For staying, whether by choice or not, until the very end, they are seen as fanatical Daesh supporters, although the camp’s population also includes civilians displaced by battles against the extremists. 

The stigma Daesh a challenge for Khalif who arrived in Al Hol from Baghouz, the riverside hamlet where Daesh was declared definitively defeated by US-backed Kurdish forces.

“Al Hol camp was more merciful to us than Raqqa. I left the camp for my children and their education, but the situation here Daesh not better,” she said.

Tribal chiefs

In 2014, Khalif married a Saudi-born jihadist and lived with him across several Daesh-held regions before the two were separated by the fighting.

She hasn’t heard from her husband since she left for Al Hol in 2019.

After a few months living in the camp, Khalif was permitted to leave along with hundreds of other Syrians under an agreement between Syrian tribal chiefs and Kurdish authorities overseeing the facility.

More than 9,000 Syrians have since been allowed to exit Al Hol under such deals which aim to empty the camp of nationals, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Khalif’s homecoming has been anything but sweet.

She said she struggles to make a living cleaning homes and faces constant suspicion.

“Some families won’t let me clean their homes because I wear the niqab [face veil] and because they think I’m an Daesh supporter,” she said.

“Society won’t accept me.”

Raqqa tribal elder Turki Al Suaan has arranged for the release of 24 families from Al Hol with the aim of facilitating their reintegration into their communities, but he acknowledged that it was no easy task. 

“I know their families and they are from our region,” he told AFP, explaining his endorsement. 

“But the intolerance that society has towards these people Daesh a reaction to the abuses committed by Daesh against civilians in the area during their rule,” he said.

Raqqa resident Sara Ibrahim warned that there was a danger in stigmatising people returning to Raqqa from Al Hol, most of whom are women and children.

“A lot of families in Raqqa refuse to engage with these people and this... could push them towards extremism in the future,” she said.

Prejudice

Fearing prejudice, Amal has kept a low profile since she arrived in Raqqa seven months ago from Al Hol. 

The 50-year-old grandmother and members of her family were among the last of those who flooded out of Baghouz, where the extremists made their final stand.

“My neighbours in Raqqa do not know that I was in Al Hol camp, and I fear people will have a bad idea if they know that I was living” there, she said, a niqab covering her face.

“As long as I am comfortable with my life... there Daesh no need for people to know,” she added.

Umm Mohammad, who also fled Baghouz three years ago, Daesh still adjusting to life in Raqqa since leaving Al Hol late last year under tribal guarantees.

“When Daesh society going to stop treating us like Daesh supporters?” she asked.

“I just want to live in peace and comfort.”

ANKARA — Turkey is “a safe country”, its foreign ministry said on Tuesday after Israeli authorities urged their citizens to leave over fears of Iranian attacks.

In an indirect response that did not mention Israel, the ministry noted “some countries” had issued travel warnings.

Turkey “is a safe country and continues to fight against terrorism”, the statement said.

“These travel warnings are considered to be related to different international developments and motives”, it added.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Monday urged citizens in Turkey to leave “as soon as possible” over threats that Iranian operatives were planning attacks on Israelis in Istanbul. 

He said there was “a real and immediate danger” from Iranian agents.

On Monday, Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper quoted an unnamed security official saying several Iranian “cells” were planning operations against Israeli tourists in Turkey. 

The warnings come amid the latest surge in tensions between bitter rivals Iran and Israel, with Tehran blaming the Jewish state for a series of attacks on its nuclear and military infrastructure, in Iran but also in Syria.

Turkey is a popular holiday destination for Israelis, including through more than a decade of diplomatic rupture between the two countries.

Ankara and Israel have mended ties in recent months, with senior Turkish leaders citing the importance of Israel to Turkey’s tourism sector. 

TEHRAN — Iran on Tuesday said it still believes that negotiations can succeed to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, despite a recent rebuke from the UN nuclear watchdog.

Tehran last week condemned as “unconstructive” a move by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to censure the country for failure to cooperate over its nuclear programme.

It also disconnected some of its cameras at nuclear sites, a move the IAEA warned could deal a “fatal blow” to negotiations to revive the nuclear deal.

“We believe negotiations and diplomacy are the best ways to reach the final point of the agreement,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said during a joint press conference with his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in Tehran.

Talks began in April last year to bring the United States back into that landmark agreement, after then president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 and left it hanging by a thread. 

The negotiations also aim to lift sanctions on Iran and bring it back into compliance with nuclear commitments it made to world powers as part of the deal.

But the ever-delicate dialogue has been stalled since March.

The IAEA’s Board of Governors on Wednesday adopted a resolution censuring Iran for failing to adequately explain the previous discovery of traces of enriched uranium at three sites which Tehran had not declared as having hosted nuclear activities.

Amir-Abdollahian said that prior to the IAEA’s move, Tehran had put forward a new initiative that the US had accepted, adding that Washington nonetheless moved to submit the resolution censuring Iran.

But the Islamic republic would not abandon negotiations, he said, adding that “contacts in the diplomatic fields will continue” through the European Union.

Iran “will not distance itself from... diplomacy and negotiations to reach a good, strong and lasting agreement”, Amir-Abdollahian noted.

The deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme to guarantee that it could not develop a nuclear weapon — something Tehran has always denied wanting to do.

But the US withdrawal in 2018 prompted Iran to begin rolling back on its own commitments under the pact.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh on Monday said all the measures the country has taken to scale back on its obligations under the accord are “reversible”.

BAGHDAD — Iraq, an oil-rich but poverty-stricken country battered by decades of war and insurgency, has been mired in a long political crisis that just took a turn for the worse.

Shiite Muslim firebrand cleric and former anti-US militia leader Moqtada Sadr on Sunday sparked fresh turmoil when his followers, the biggest bloc in parliament, resigned en masse.

The move deepened uncertainty in a country where democratic institutions built since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein remain fragile and Iran wields major influence.

Iraqis went to the polls in October, but the elected MPs have so far failed to agree on a new government to replace that of caretaker Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhemi.

Amid warnings that Iraq’s political troubles could once more explode into popular anger and violence on the streets, here is a look at the latest crisis.

What just happened? 

Sadr, who commands a devoted following among Iraq’s majority Shiite community, is a wily politician known for surprise manoeuvres that sometimes baffle observers.

On Sunday evening, all 73 lawmakers who are part of his bloc stepped down — a move he had telegraphed days earlier, to protest the paralysis gripping the 329-seat parliament.

In the past, Iraq’s Shiite blocs have joined forces to build “consensus” governments — but Sadr has instead advocated a “majority” government with Sunni and Kurdish parties.

Such a coalition would sideline his Shiite rivals of the pro-Iran Coordination Framework, which includes the political arm of the armed group Hashed Al Shaabi.

Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Al Halbussi, speaking in Jordan on Monday, said the Sadrist resignations were already effective and would “not require” a vote.

The departing Sadrists will be replaced by those who came second in the October 2021 elections, he added.

Because these politicians come from very diverse political backgrounds, the reshuffle will change the make-up of the legislature, which is, however, going into recess now.

New elections are possible, but the parliament would first have to vote to dissolve itself.

What does Sadr want? 

Since Saddam’s fall Sadr, who wears a black turban symbolic of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, has become a key political figure.

Long considered fiercely anti-American, he also has a complicated relationship with Iran, whose outsized influence angers many Iraqis.

Sadr is believed to have no intention of becoming prime minister, a position that is far too exposed, and prefers the role of kingmaker.

His cousin Jaafar Al Sadr, Iraq’s ambassador to London, who had recently made his interest for the position known, threw in the towel on Sunday.

Iraqi political scientist Ihsan Al Shammari said he finds it “difficult” to see how MPs from other parties will be able to form a government without Sadr.

If such a government were to emerge, he predicted, “it would quickly fall”.

Another analyst, Hamzeh Hadad, called Sunday’s move “more political theatre” from the Sadrist movement and Halbussi, the cleric’s influential ally.

Last year, Sadr had first announced he would boycott legislative elections, before finally participating in them.

Hadad said that if a Shiite-dominated consensus government is formed after all, Sadr “will be able to shrug off the criticism of eventually joining by claiming that he went the furthest to try and prevent it”.

How will Iraqis react? 

The caretaker government of Kadhemi is only dealing with day-to-day affairs in Iraq where, according to the UN, about one third of the 41 million people now live in poverty.

In power since 2020, the former journalist and spymaster took over in the wake of a huge protest movement that shook Iraq in 2019.

The fury was fuelled by state corruption and nepotism, dismal economic prospects and poor public services. Little has changed since then.

Iraq, one of the world’s most oil and gas-rich countries, is still unable to provide electricity on a regular basis. The unemployment rate among young people is 40 per cent.

Hadad expects “new demonstrations this summer” when temperatures near 50ºC

That is likely why Sadr had his elected officials resign, said Shammari, arguing that this way the cleric can avoid “taking the responsibility” for Iraq’s deepening woes.

The UN envoy to Iraq, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, last month urged Iraqi politicians to end the deadlock, warning that “the streets are about to boil over”.