Region

RAMALLAH, Palestine — Palestinians on Wednesday received their first delivery of coronavirus vaccines via the United Nations Covax programme supporting poorer areas, an AFP journalist in the occupied West Bank reported.

Earlier, some 60,000 doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines allocated to the Palestinians under the Covax scheme arrived at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, according to an Israeli security source.

The UN's Middle East envoy, Tor Wennesland, welcomed the delivery.

"Those vaccines being sent to the West Bank and Gaza will be critical tools in our fight against the pandemic and for socioeconomic recovery," his office quoted him as saying.

The vaccines arrive as Palestinian hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, in sharp contrast to neighbouring Israel which has fully vaccinated nearly 46 per cent of its population with twin doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The Palestinian Authority said that vaccination would begin on Sunday, primarily for those aged over 75, cancer patients and medical personnel.

Israel has provided 5,000 doses to Palestinian medical personnel, and vaccinated 90,000 Palestinians who work inside Israel or in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But while rights groups have urged it to extend its innoculation campaign throughout the territory, as the occupying power, Israel says health responsibilities there fall to the Palestinian Authority.

The United Arab Emirates has sent around 60,000 doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V to the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave of two million inhabitants. 

The Palestinians are also to receive 100,000 Chinese vaccine doses and nearly two million other portions through the Covax scheme, set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Alliance for Human Rights. 

In Gaza, health authorities have confirmed more than 57,000 infected people, including more than 568 dead, since the start of the pandemic.

In the occupied West Bank, around 156,000 patients have been recorded, including more than 1,745 deaths.

TRIPOLI — Tunisian President Kais Saied on Wednesday visited neighbouring Libya, where a UN-backed unity government is seeking to restore stability after a decade of violence and division.

The first such visit since 2012, Saied's trip aims to show "Tunisia's support for the democratic process in Libya" and for greater "stability and prosperity", his office said.

Libya descended into chaos as  Muamar Qadhafi was toppled and killed in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 and an array of armed groups battled to fill the void.

The turmoil has also impacted Tunisia, sharply reducing cross-border trade and turning Libya into a launchpad for a series of bloody extremist attacks in Tunisia.

On Wednesday, Saied was welcomed at the airport by Mohamed Al Manfi, head of a new three-member presidency council, who hailed the visit as "historic".

The pair discussed reviving bilateral agreements and trade, strengthening investment and facilitating dealings between their central banks, according to a Tunisian presidency statement.

Saied later met Libya’s new interim Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who was sworn in on Monday and is tasked with governing until December elections.

Discussions focused on reinforcing ties in a variety of areas, “in particular the economy, health, transport and education”, according to the Tunisian presidency.

Saied also called for “intensifying efforts” to discover the fate of Tunisian journalists Sofiene Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari, who went missing in 2014 in Libya’s Ajdabiya region.

Libya’s new transitional executive emerged from a complex UN-sponsored process launched in November in Tunis. Its members were selected in Geneva then confirmed by Libya’s parliament on March 10. 

Saied, who has made few official trips since his election in October 2019, only announced his visit on Tuesday, the day the new government was formally launched. 

He was joined by Foreign Minister Othman Jerandi and top Saied adviser Nadia Akacha. 

The presidency later announced on Twitter that he had arrived back in Tunisia.

Before 2011, oil-rich Libya was a major customer for Tunisian farm produce and building materials as well as migrant labour.

But repeated border closures over conflict and more recently the coronavirus pandemic have battered Tunisia’s crucial informal economy.

Extremist repatriated 

Libya also became a fertile ground for extremist groups including the Daesh terror group, with many Tunisians joining its ranks.

Rights groups said on Wednesday that Tunisia had repatriated at least 16 women and children accused of links to jihadist fighters imprisoned in Libya.

The issue of such repatriations is hotly debated in Tunisia, after several bloody attacks carried out at home by Tunisians trained in Libya.

Activists urged Saied to plead for the release of others still in Libyan detention.

Campaign group the Rescue Association of Tunisians Trapped Abroad says around 20 Tunisian children and 15 women remain in detention in Libya.

Libya was in recent years split between a Government of National Accord in Tripoli, and an eastern-based administration, backed by strongman Khalifa Haftar.

The two sides reached a ceasefire in October.

While the GNA has been backed by Turkey and Qatar, Haftar has received support from the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Egypt, in spite of a long-running arms embargo.

Thousands of foreign fighters and mercenaries remain in the country. 

Senior European officials said Wednesday that the European Union, which runs a military mission in the Mediterranean policing the UN embargo, is set to extend its mission for two years to the end of March 2023. 

Tunisia’s successive governments have carefully avoided taking sides, while opposing all foreign interference in Libya.

BEIRUT — Lebanese protesters briefly attempted to storm the economy ministry on Wednesday to denounce exploding prices of basic goods as the local currency collapses.

Around 20 protesters had gathered outside the ministry's Beirut headquarters a day after the Lebanese pound hit a new-low of 15,000 to the greenback, according to an AFP correspondent.

Some tried to enter the building, causing tension with security forces, the official National News Agency reported.

"We are killing each other for a bag of diapers and a carton of milk," one protester told a local TV station.

The political class "have humiliated us", he said, denouncing hikes in consumer prices which rose by almost 146 per cent during 2020, according to official statistics.

Later in the afternoon, demonstrators tried to march towards the presidential palace outside Beirut but they were stopped by security forces.

Others blocked several key roads across the country with burning tyres and torched garbage bins.

Lebanon is in the grips of its worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.

The pound, officially pegged at 1,507 to the greenback since 1997, has lost almost 90 percent of its value on the black market.

It was changing hands for around 14,000 to the dollar on Wednesday.

Outgoing finance minister Ghazi Wazni on Wednesday met with central bank chief Riad Salameh who recently returned from France.

During the meeting, Salameh offered suggestions to “decrease the exchange rate”, according to a finance ministry statement.

The ministry and the central bank would review his proposal within the next 24 hours, the statement said.

Also on Wednesday, the head of the syndicate of fuel distributers, Fadi Abou Chacra, announced a new increase in petrol prices, already rising on global price hikes, NNA reported.

With the latest increase, the price of petrol has climbed by around 49 per cent since July.

Lebanon’s crisis is also eating away at the country’s dwindling foreign currency reserves which have so far funded subsidies on key goods such as fuel, flour and medicine.

The diminishing funds are cornering the government into cutting such support, which will push more of the population into poverty.

Some 55 per cent of Lebanese live below the global poverty line of 3.84 dollars a day, the United Nations says.

The country is also facing political deadlock, with no new government agreed some seven months after premier Hassan Diab resigned over an August 4 explosion that killed more than 200 people and disfigured swathes of the capital.

ADEN — Hundreds of Yemenis took to the streets of the southern port city of Aden for a second day on Wednesday to protest poor living conditions and rising prices in the war-torn country.

They marched through the de facto capital, where the internationally recognised government is based, chanting: “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, the South.”

Some carried flags of the country’s southern separatist movement and others flashed the V peace sign, as they gathered near the United Nations office.

Protesters told AFP they were angry over a lack of services and delayed salaries, urging the UN to pressure the government into implementing economic reforms.

“The general situation is bad,” Mohammed Al Ataf, a retired officer, told AFP.

“Electricity and services are all cut off. People are suffering and mourning from hunger and distress in their lives.”

The march came a day after angry protestors — including retired military and security officers — stormed the presidential palace in Aden before being pushed back and dispersing peacefully.

‘Starving in their homes’ 

Yemen’s government was formed in December under a Saudi-sponsored power-sharing agreement between ministers loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and supporters of the secessionist Southern Transitional Council(STC).

Both are technically fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who control the capital Sanaa in the north.

But the STC has sought to restore South Yemen’s independence from the north. The two sides unified in 1990.

Aden residents claim the new government has not done anything to remedy price inflation or repeated power cuts.

“We want the currency exchange rate to return to what it was in the past,” Arwa, the widow of a Yemeni soldier, told AFP.

“Everything is going up, even sugar and rice... there are people starving in their homes, with no food and no water. We cannot afford our rents.”

Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war between the government — backed by a Saudi-led military coalition — and the Houthi rebels since 2014, pushing the country to the brink of famine.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have been killed and millions displaced in the conflict, which has crippled the economy and healthcare system.

The UN calls the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

ANKARA — Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party was fighting for its political survival on Wednesday after a prosecutor asked the country’s top court to shut it down for alleged links to militants waging a deadly insurgency against the state.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long portrayed the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) — parliament’s third-largest — as the political front of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The PKK has been waging an insurgency since 1984 that has killed tens of thousands and is recognised as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.

But the HDP firmly denies formal links to the militants and says it is coming under attack because of its fervent opposition to Erdogan’s 18-year rule.

Wednesday’s request to ban the party came from a supreme court prosecutor who is investigating the HDP.

Prosecutor Bekir Sahin alleged that the HDP “was acting together with PKK terrorists and affiliated organisations, acting as an extension of such organisations”.

He added that such activity threatened “”to destroy the indivisibility between the state and the people”, the Anadolu state news agency reported.

Sit-in protest 

The constitutional court could theoretically throw out the prosecutor’s indictment and not put the HDP on trial.

But Western governments question the Turkish justice system’s independence and accuse Erdogan of using the courts as a political bludgeon aimed at suppressing dissent.

The political and legal assault on the HDP intensified after a shaky truce between the militants and Erdogan’s government broke down in 2015.

It grew even stronger after Erdogan survived a failed coup bid in 2016 that was followed by a political crackdown that saw tens of thousands jailed or stripped of their state jobs.

Those detained included two former HDP co-chairs who were jailed in 2016 and face decades in prison.

Most of the 65 HDP mayors elected in the predominantly Kurdish southeast in 2019 have been replaced by government-appointed trustees.

The Turkish prosecutor’s request to ban the party was carried by state media while the party’s lawmakers were staging a sit-in protest in parliament over the expulsion of one of their members.

Parliament had earlier on Wednesday decided to strip MP Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu of his seat, and its accompanying immunity from prosecution, over a social media post.

The offending post featured an article in which the Kurdish militants urged the government to take a step toward peace.

Turkey’s top appeals court last month upheld Gergerlioglu’s 2018 conviction for “spreading terrorism propaganda” over a post he shared in 2016.

But Gergerlioglu refused to leave after the HDP’s parliamentary faction began banging on desks and chanting protest slogans in the hollowed out chamber.

“We’re not going to be silent, we’re not scared, we’re not going to submit,” the MPs chanted as the standoff stretched into the evening hours.

‘A shocking attack’ 

The HDP’s parliamentary group co-chair Meral Danis Bestas said Gergerlioglu had become the 14th party lawmakers to have been stripped of his immunity since 2016.

“You cannot do as you please with MPs elected by the people,” her fellow co-chair Saruhan Oluc told reporters.

Gergerlioglu has long irritated Erdogan’s government by shining a light on a variety of human rights violations that often go ignored by the mainstream Turkish media.

His advocacy for female detainees subjected to strip searches particularly angered the government last year.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted that Gergerlioglu’s offending posts never promoted violence and that he was stripped of his seat before the constitutional court had a chance to review his appeal.

HRW’s Turkey director Emma Sinclair-Webb called it “a shocking attack on democratic norms and the rule of law, a violation of Turkey’s constitution, laws and obligations under international law”.

By Fawaz Al Haidari
Agence France-Presse

ABU DHABI — Years of setbacks have weakened the once mighty Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, but the militants are seizing the opportunity to regenerate while the government and Houthi rebels are locked in a fight to the death in the north.

Government security officials and tribal leaders told AFP that the fierce battle for Marib, which has raged for the past month, is creating a security vacuum that is being exploited by the extremists.

Once seen as the most potent Al Qaeda franchise, they have suffered multiple defeats in the past three years, leaving them deprived of territory and fighters, and with mystery surrounding the fate of the leadership.

“The governorate of Marib has been AQAP’s main stronghold for years,” said one intelligence official.

While the main combatants in Yemen’s six-year war sustain heavy losses in an effort to control Marib city, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains “at ease” elsewhere in the region where it retains strong influence in villages and small towns.

“As others get busy fighting, they are training fighters again, planning, rebuilding relations” with local tribes and chasing “financial support” from local communities, the official added.

Marib city, the capital of the oil-rich governorate, is the last northern stronghold for the internationally recognised government which is backed by a Saudi-led military coalition.

The Houthis control the rest of the north after years of conflict which has plunged Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“The war in Marib could be ending the maximum pressure campaign that almost wiped [AQAP] out” in Yemen in the last few years, another Yemeni intelligence official said.

Rapid rise... 

Born at a meeting of extremists on a January evening in 2009, in southern Abyan’s rugged mountains, AQAP was a marriage of convenience between the network’s offshoots in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, as they faced the onslaught of US and regional military campaigns.

The group led by Nasser Al Wuhayshi and his deputy Said Al Shihri, former prisoners in Sanaa and Guantanamo respectively, found immediate success as Yemen grappled with growing instability — a secessionist movement in the south, a rebellion in the north and a crippling economic crisis.

In one year, the group recruited hundreds of fighters with the help of local tribes, attracted extremists from Asia and Africa, claimed deadly attacks, and attempted to kill a senior Saudi official and bomb a US civilian plane.

It even issued one of the first English online magazines, called Inspire.

Even before that, the shadow of Al Qaeda hung over Yemen — the group claimed responsibility for the 2000 attack against the destroyer USS Cole in the southern city of Aden that killed 17 US military personnel.

By the end of that decade “they had a strong basis for their movement and many safe havens”, said Hossam Radman from the Sanaa Centre for Strategic Studies.

AQAP peaked in 2014, invading towns and taking control of the southern city of Mukalla in 2015, while its main competitor the Daesh group was gaining ground in Iraq and Syria.

Outside Yemen, the group attacked the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo in 2015, killing 12, showing its ability to strike far from home.

“It is logical that the continuation of the battle in Marib and the inability of any of the two sides to win will be a major gain for the organisation as it rearranges its ranks,” said Saeed Bakran, an expert on Yemeni extremists.

...and decline 

When Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention in Yemen in March 2015, aimed at halting the Houthis’ astonishing gains, its eye was also fixed on AQAP.

The UAE, a key member of the Saudi-led coalition, took the lead in driving AQAP out of villages one after the other with the help of US forces, weapons, and intelligence.

US drones and special forces managed to locate and kill leaders including the long-feared Al Wuhayshi in 2015.

Another challenge was the ambition of the Daesh, as the rivals tussled for territory and support over the years.

“All these elements weakened AQAP. Today, it is facing financial problems, many members are accused of treason, and others joined Daesh,” a tribal leader in Marib told AFP.

Despite that, it “continued to exploit the security vacuum created by the ongoing conflict” and to “conduct attacks and operate in areas of southern and central Yemen with relative impunity”, according to a 2019 US report on terrorism.

AQAP fighters are estimated to number in the low thousands, according to the report.

Then came the battle for Marib, some 120 kilometres east of the rebel-controlled capital Sanaa.

“The fighting is helping the group reorganise. They even pushed some of their fighters to join the ranks of the resistance battling the Houthis, to benefit from the financial support they receive,” the tribal leader said, referring to salaries believed to be paid by the coalition.

Last month, the group called on Yemenis to raise arms against the Houthis in Marib, portraying itself once again as the “defender of Muslims” in the region.

JALJULIA — It had been days since 14-year-old Mohammed Adas was shot dead outside his home in Israel, but his mother Suheila couldn't bear to wash his scent off his clothes.

Mohammed's killing was just the latest chapter in a crime epidemic ravaging Arab Israelis — many of whom blame police racism.

"No one knows who shot him or why," his father Abdelrazak told AFP at the family's home in Jaljulia, near Tel Aviv.

"What I do know is that the police are 20 metres from here and if my son was Jewish there would be helicopters everywhere."

Tackling the crime wave among the minority has become a political flashpoint ahead of March 23 elections.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has demonised Arab voters in the past, has pledged action as he looks for support in a community that has traditionally rejected him and his right-wing Likud Party.

Most Arab Israeli leaders scoff at the suggestion that Netanyahu can ease the crisis, insisting the solution lies in tackling police prejudice against Arabs — something that has proliferated during the premier's 12-year tenure.

The night he died, Mohammed Adas had gone out for pizza with a friend.

Shortly afterwards, Suheila and her husband Abdelrazak heard gunshots.

Twenty minutes later, they found Mohammed lying in a pool of blood, behind a car a few metres from their home.

Suheila has since been inconsolable. Abdelrazak finds himself popping into his son's room, desperately hoping someone is there.

According to the Abraham Initiative, a civil society group that promotes social cohesion between Arabs and Jews in Israel, Mohammed Adas was the 23rd Arab killed in the country so far this year.

A 24th was killed this week.

In 2020, more than 90 per cent of shootings in Israel took place in Arab communities, according to police.

'They have cameras everywhere'

Arab Israelis, Palestinians who stayed on their land following Israel's creation in 1948, currently account for around a fifth of its population.

In Israel's last election a year ago, Arab parties united as the Joint List coalition, securing a record 15 seats in the 120-member parliament.

But the Joint List has splintered amid ideological divisions, creating a possibility that some Arab votes may be up for grabs.

That has put the spotlight on the violence rocking the country's Arab communities.

Kifah Aghbaria, who lives in the northern city of Umm Al Fahm, lost four relatives to crime last year.

She has demonstrated outside the city’s police station every Friday for weeks, with portraits of her dead relatives, all in their 20s and 30s, under her arm.

They were killed, she said, because they stood up to local mafia.

Solving the crisis would mean addressing police discrimination against Arabs, she said.

“They have cameras everywhere. How can they not find the criminals?”

“The fight against crime in Arab cities is a war and we are going to win it,” she added.

But she insisted that reelecting Netanyahu will not help.

Police spokesman Wassim Badr rejected accusations of inaction, telling AFP that officers were working “around the clock” to solve such crimes and had made arrests in connection with 19 of this year’s murders.

‘Ridiculous’

The collapse of the Joint List was partly triggered by Arab lawmaker Mansour Abbas, of the conservative Islamic Raam movement, suggesting he was open to supporting Netanyahu in order to address crime.

Netanyahu’s government on March 1 approved a 150 million shekel ($45 million) crime-fighting proposal for Arab communities, including expanding police stations and creating a new dedicated unit.

Netanyahu called it “major news for the Arab society in Israel”.

But Yousef Jabareen, a Joint List lawmaker with strong support in Umm Al Fahm, rejected the proposal.

The PM is “trying in a ridiculous way to get some [political] help from within the Arab community, as if we have a short memory and don’t remember that he’s responsible for these racist [laws] and policies towards us”.

Netanyahu’s backing for the 2018 Nation State Law, which enshrined Israel as a state for Jews while downgrading Arabic’s status as an official language, was widely perceived as legally downgrading Arabs.

“The issue is not about adding more police, but to change the policies vis-a-vis the Arab communities,” Jabareen told AFP.

He said unemployment, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, was fuelling the violence.

And as the country gears up for elections next week, Abdelrazak Adas is waiting for answers as to why his son ended up lying dead in the street.

When Arabs kill each other, he said, “Nobody cares”.

BEIRUT — Lebanon's currency hit a new low against the dollar on the black market Tuesday, continuing its freefall in a country gripped by political deadlock and an economic crisis.

The latest plunge means the Lebanese pound has lost almost 90 per cent of its value on the informal market in just 18 months.

The Lebanese pound has been pegged to the dollar at 1,500 since 1997, but the country's worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war has seen its unofficial value plummet.

The slide has picked up speed over the past two weeks, with the exchange rate soaring from 10,000 Lebanese pounds to the dollar on March 2 to around 15,000 on Tuesday.

Three money changers said they were buying dollars for 14,800 to 14,900 Lebanese pounds, while a customer told AFP they had sold the foreign currency at 15,000 pounds to the dollar.

The pound's fall has led to soaring food prices in a country where more than half of the population now lives below the poverty line.

The smell of burnt tyres wafted over Beirut on Tuesday after gaggles of protesters took to the streets in the capital and elsewhere in the country, in the latest such demonstrations in recent weeks.

"Lebanon exchange rate reaches 15,000LL to the 1$. Last night it was 13,250," tweeted analyst Maha Yahya.

“Country collapsing around us & we are unable to do anything,” said Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre.

Since autumn 2019, banks have largely prevented ordinary depositors from accessing their dollar savings or transferring them abroad, forcing them to resort to the black market to obtain foreign currency.

In a country that needs dollars to import goods, several shops have closed their doors in recent days to re-price goods and some factories have halted production.

The government resigned in August last year after a devastating port blast that killed 200 people and ravaged a large part of the capital.

But the deeply divided political class has failed to form a new Cabinet to enact desperately needed reforms to unlock billions of dollars in promised international aid.

France and the United States last week hit out at Lebanon’s squabbling politicians, with Paris saying they were failing to help the country as it slid towards “total collapse”.

France has taken a leading role in trying to break the political deadlock in its former protectorate, with President Emmanuel Macron visiting the country twice last year.