Region

BEIRUT — Three members of Hamas died on Sunday when shooting erupted at the funeral procession of a member of the Islamist movement in a south Lebanon Palestinian refugee camp, the group said.

Hamas official Raafat Al Murra said militants from the rival Fateh movement “shot at the funeral procession” of a Palestinian killed in a blast on Friday at the Burj Al Shemali Camp, outside the port city of Tyre.

Six people were wounded, he said.

A camp resident told AFP an armed clash followed the shooting and that elements of both Fateh and Hamas had been deployed.

An electrical short circuit in a store containing oxygen supplies for COVID patients caused Friday’s blast, Hamas had said, denying media reports that an arms depot blew up.

The explosion blackened the walls and shattered windows of a nearby mosque.

“The fire caused damage to property but the impact was limited,” Hamas said, without detailing casualties.

According to a Palestinian official, one man died of his injuries from Friday night’s explosion, which also left a few people wounded.

Officially, Lebanon hosts about 192,000 Palestinian refugees, most of whom live in the country’s 12 camps, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

By longstanding agreement, the Lebanese army does not enter the camps, leaving security inside to Palestinian factions.

Hamas and Fateh, the secular party led by Mahmud Abbas, have been at odds since 2007 when the Islamists seized Gaza after a week of deadly clashes.

Though based in Gaza, Hamas operates branches elsewhere in the Middle East including Lebanon.

TRIPOLI — The Libyan government said on Sunday it is ready to hold the country's presidential election as planned on December 24 despite persistent uncertainty that the crucial vote will go ahead on time.

"We are ready for the elections," said Ramadan Abu Jnah, interim head of government since premier Abdulhamid Dbeibah announced he would run for the presidency.

"The government has spared no effort to support the electoral commission [HNEC]. We have the chance to make December 24 a historic day," Abu Jnah said.

Libya descended into chaos following a NATO-backed 2011 revolt that overthrew and killed dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

The December 24 polls are intended to help the oil-rich North African country move past a decade of violence.

But the process has been undermined by bitter divisions over the legal basis for the elections, their dates, and who should be allowed to run, with a string of controversial figures stepping forward.

"Nobody should deprive Libyans of this historic deadline and we will not let anybody do so," Abu Jnah told a press conference in the capital Tripoli, surrounded by several ministers.

He said the transitional executive was "ready to hand over power to an elected government".

Less than a fortnight from the planned vote, the election campaign is yet to begin, and the vote body on Saturday delayed publication of a final list of candidates.

Interior Minister Khaled Mazen called for the presidential vote to be held on time, and said his ministry had "carried out its work to protect and secure voting centres" despite "obstacles".

A year of relative peace in Libya followed an October 2020 ceasefire between warring eastern and western camps, but analysts have warned that violence could easily flare again over the elections.

An electoral law signed this September by the speaker of the eastern-based parliament, Aguila Saleh, sparked anger in the country’s west, where many accuse him of bypassing protocol and pushing through legislation favouring a run by his ally, strongman Khalifa Haftar.

The following month, the eastern-based House of Representatives said a legislative vote also planned for December 24 had been delayed to January.

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Palestinians in villages in the Israeli-occupied West Bank voted in municipal polls on Saturday, amid a boycott by the main opposition Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza, in protest at the indefinite postponement of a general election.

No legislative or presidential election has been held in the Palestinian territories for 15 years, while the last municipal vote — also boycotted by Hamas — took place in 2017.

Of the 367 villages in the West Bank, 60 had no candidates standing and another 162 had a single list, leaving only 154 villages actually voting on Saturday.

The spokesman for the Palestinian Central Elections Commission, Fareed Taam Allah, told AFP that polling stations had opened in all villages scheduled to vote on Saturday.

"I hope that elections will lead up to a presidential election so that we can choose a president who represents us and a new government," said Maslama Srour, a 26-year-old voter in Nilin, a village near Ramallah.

"We don't want the same government, we want to see something new, we hope to see change, new people, especially young people," Srour told AFP.

Polling stations are open until 7:00 pm (17:00 GMT), with some 405,000 people eligible to vote. As of 4:00 pm, the turnout was 46 per cent, according to the elections committee.

The municipal vote — the first of two stages, with cities and towns due to vote in March 2022 — is widely considered as inconsequential, with most candidates running as independents and Hamas not taking part.

They are "politically unimportant because they are taking place in villages and not the big cities", and are "futile" in the absence of Hamas, political analyst Jihad Harb said.

The Hamas group, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, is boycotting the vote in protest at President Mahmoud Abbas' indefinite postponement of parliamentary and presidential elections that had been scheduled for earlier this year.

The Islamists had been poised to sweep the parliamentary election, which was widely seen as the real reason for Abbas’s 11th-hour postponement of the poll, citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in occupied East Jerusalem.

Abbas’s presidential term was supposed to end in 2009.

Hamas and Fateh, the secular party led by 86-year-old Abbas, have been at loggerheads since 2007 when the Islamists seized Gaza after a week of deadly clashes.

TRIPOLI — Libya's election commission on Saturday delayed publication of a final list of candidates for a presidential election scheduled in less than two weeks.

It is just the latest twist in a UN-led effort targeting December 24 presidential polls intended to help the oil-rich North African country move past a decade of violence.

The process has been undermined by bitter divisions over the legal basis for the elections, their dates, and who should be allowed to run, with a string of controversial figures stepping forward.

Publication of the final candidate list is supposed to mark the formal start of the election campaign, but the election commission did not give a new date for issuing the list.

Rules governing the ballot — which would be the first time a Libyan head of state is chosen by universal suffrage — say the commission should publish the list of candidates two weeks after final court rulings and appeals related to candidacies.

On December 2, a Libyan court reinstated Seif Al Islam Qadhafi, a son of slain president Muammar Qadhafi, as a candidate.

A day earlier, an appeals court in Tripoli rejected petitions against the candidacy of interim Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, who heads the Tripoli-based unity government established in March and charged with leading the country to presidential and legislative elections.

Libya descended into chaos with the NATO-backed 2011 revolt that overthrew and killed Qadhafi.

A year of relative peace followed an October 2020 ceasefire between warring eastern and western camps, but analysts have warned that violence could easily flare again surrounding the elections.

A statement on the election commission’s website said it must still adopt a series of judicial and legal measures “before proceeding to the publication of the definitive list of candidates and the start of their electoral campaign”.

It added that success of the electoral process cannot be borne solely by the elections commission “since the results will cast a shadow over the present and future of the country”.

The commission added that it is being careful not to limit its role to implementing the law, but ensuring that its functions extend to “correct interpretation of the law”.

PARIS — France will open classified police files from the Algerian war 15 years ahead of schedule in order to “look the truth in the eyes”, the government announced on Friday.

The files cover criminal investigations during the 1954-1962 war of independence and are likely to confirm the widespread use of torture and extra-judicial killings by French forces.

“We have things to rebuild with Algeria. They can only be rebuilt on the truth,” said Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot on BFMTV.

“I want this question — which is troubling, aggravating, and where falsifiers of history are at work — I want us to be able to look it in the eyes. We can’t build a national story on a lie,” she added.

The announcement comes as France seeks to defuse a major diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

It was triggered in October when President Emmanuel Macron accused Algeria’s “political-military system” of rewriting history and fomenting “hatred towards France”.

‘Never fear the truth’ 

The trauma of the Algerian War has poisoned French politics for the past 60 years.

A key strand of today’s far-right nationalism has its roots in the war and then-president Charles de Gaulle’s abrupt decision to grant Algeria independence in 1962 — for which he faced assassination bids and attempted military coups.

Asked about the likelihood that incidents of torture will be uncovered in the archives, Bachelot said: “It is in the interest of the country that they are recognised.”

“We should never fear the truth. We must put it in context.”

Historians have previously been able to request access to the archives, held in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence, but the procedure was lengthy and often blocked on national security grounds.

The de-classification is not expected to include the army’s files.

Macron, France’s first leader born after the colonial era, has made a priority of reckoning with its past and forging a new relationship with former colonies.

He has recognised the killing of anti-colonial activists by French forces during the war, including Algerian lawyer Ali Boumendjel and communist activist Maurice Audin.

Macron also in October condemned “inexcusable crimes” during a 1961 crackdown against Algerian pro-independence protesters in Paris, during which police led by a former Nazi collaborator killed dozens of demonstrators and threw their bodies into the river Seine.

No apology 

Karim Amellal, a scholar appointed as ambassador to the Mediterranean region by Macron, welcomed the move to open the files as “extremely positive”.

“There is a very strong demand from historians to declassify documents covered by national security. We can’t follow a policy of remembrance without following the path traced by these historians,” he said.

Macron has, however, ruled out an official apology for France’s actions — seeing such a move as a gift to far-right opponents in next year’s presidential election.

Meanwhile, his criticisms of the Algerian government in October have turned always-thorny relations into a full-blown crisis.

It did not help that Macron questioned whether Algeria had existed as a nation before the French invasion in the 1800s.

And it came just a month after France sharply reduced visa quotas for North African citizens.

Algeria has responded by withdrawing its ambassador and banning French military planes from its airspace, which they regularly use for anti-terrorist operations in the region.



VIENNA — International diplomats restarted talks on Iran's nuclear programme on Thursday for what the chair of the negotiations called the "difficult endeavour" of reviving the 2015 deal between Iran and world powers.

The latest round of talks began last week and were paused on December 3 with Western participants accusing Iran of going back on progress made earlier this year.

The heads of delegations from the parties to the 2015 deal -- Britain, China, France, Germany, Iran and Russia -- were present at Friday's talks, which began at the Palais Coburg luxury hotel at around 12 pm (11:00 GMT) and lasted a little more than an hour.

An American delegation plans to take part in the talks indirectly in the coming days.

"Delegations took a stack of the different consultations among capitals and they have come with a renewed sense of purpose to work hard," Enrique Mora, the EU official chairing the talks, told the press after Thursday's meeting.

Bilateral meetings as well as expert working groups are expected to continue this week.

Mora admitted that the negotiations were "a very difficult endeavour", adding: "There are still different positions that we have to marry".

Russia's ambassador to the UN in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov told the TASS agency that Thursday's talks had "removed a number of misunderstandings that had created some tension," but did not elaborate.

The current round of talks is the seventh since they started in April.

In June, Iran suspended them following the election of ultraconservative President Hassan Rouhani and they were only restarted on November 29.

US envoy Rob Malley "will plan to join the talks over the weekend," said US State Department spokesman Ned Price on Wednesday.


"We should know in pretty short order if the Iranians are going... to negotiate in good faith," Price told reporters, warning that "the runway is getting very, very short for negotiations."

'Media campaigns'  

For their part Iranian officials have insisted they are "serious about the talks".

"The fact that the two sides are continuing to talk indicates that they want to narrow the gaps," said Iran's chief negotiator Ali Bagheri.

The EU's top foreign policy official Josep Borrell spoke to Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Wednesday evening.

According to the Iranian foreign ministry website, Borrell asked Tehran to "respond to worries concerning its current nuclear programme", which has intensified in recent months.

Iranian officials have in recent days condemned the "negative" reaction of Western states after last week's meetings, saying that "such media campaigns are not constructive".

The 2015 deal has been disintegrating ever since then US President Donald Trump pulled out of the deal, which ensured sanctions relief for Iran in return for tight curbs on its nuclear programme, which was put under extensive UN monitoring.

Trump went on to re-introduce sanctions, prompting Tehran to start disregarding the deal's limits on its nuclear activities in 2019.

Trump's successor Joe Biden has said he wants the US to return to the deal but the talks have stumbled on which sanctions Washington is prepared to lift as well as guarantees demanded by Iran to protect against the prospect of a future US withdrawal.