The secretary general of the international Muslim Brotherhood Ibrahim Mounir lashed out at the recent position by the International Criminal Court turning down a complaint by an international legal team on behalf of the Freedom and Justice party regarding crimes against humanity perpetrated by the military coup leaders. Mounir...

Kayan feminist organisation launched a media campaign in Israel to counter the violations in working women’s rights in the private sector. According to grassroots organisation working within the Palestinian community, Palestinian women working in the private sector earn low salaries in violation of labour laws. The private sector also...

Journalist and Islamic thinker Fahmi Huwaidi condemned the Egyptian media’s attacks on Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood which are being funded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In an interview on Ala Masoliyaty (My Responsibility), Al-Jazeera, Huwaidi said that all media organisations and forces loyal to former President Hosni...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that he will seek to enact a law that defines Israel as a Jewish state, in a move that is set to be met with opposition from Arab citizens who make up 20 per cent of the population. Netanyahu said: “I will...

Sudan has harshly criticised the US State Department’s annual global terrorism report, released on Wednesday, which names Sudan as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. The Sudanese Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Thursday saying the US report, which insists on listing Sudan among the designated states sponsor of terrorism,...

Egypt’s higher committee for the presidential election announced on Thursday that it plans to take take legal action against presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi after he violated the presidential election law by starting his campaign before the final list of candidates has been revealed, which is scheduled for 2 May....

Presidential candidate and coup leader Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has claimed that Egypt’s population increase is one of the main causes of the country’s problems. He pointed to the possibility of exploiting manpower to establish the hoped-for economic leap. Speaking at a meeting with members of the National Council for...

Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party’s international legal team has submitted complaints to the African Commission on behalf of the 683 detainees who were sentenced to death in the country earlier this week. The hundreds of new death sentences come despite the African Commission ordering the Egyptian interim authority to...

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman repeated his refusal to grant Palestinian refugees Lebanese citizenship as part of any agreement between Palestinians and Israeli. Speaking during a diplomatic conference held in the Baabda Palace this morning, Suleiman went on to assure attendees that he remains committed to the Arab initiative for...

Israeli police yesterday rejected the US State Department’s annual global terrorism report which named Jewish extremists’ attacks against Palestinians as terrorist acts saying such incidents cannot be compared with Palestinian militants’ attacks. In an unprecedented move the US State Department refers, in its 2013 terrorism report published on Wednesday,...

Prisoners held in Zagazig prison in Egypt appealed to human rights organisations and the free world to help relieve their distress. The President of the Dahaya Centre for Human Rights in Egypt Haitham Abu Khalil published the appeal on Facebook saying: “The situation inside the prison is very difficult....

Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly, in a general meeting on Thursday, passed the country’s new electoral law with 132 voting for it, 11 against it and nine abstaining. In attendance were 152 out of 217 members of the assembly. A few members attempted to postpone the voting; however, according to...

The Palestinian technocrat government will work to unify state institutions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but the security services in both areas will stay in place until after the proposed elections, a top Hamas official has said. According to Mousa Abu Marzouk the movement will work...

Israel withdrew the VIP passes of four senior Fatah officials and threatened to do the same to the cards of others, in retaliation for the Palestinian Authority’s failure to continue peace negotiations. Palestinian sources told the London-based Raialyaoum that Nabil Shaath, Tawfik Tirawi, Abbas Zaki and General Jibril Rajoub,...

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has reiterated that it believes Muslims should not visit Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque as long as they are under Israeli occupation. In a press statement released on Thursday, Hamas criticised the recent recommendation to end the ban on Muslims’ visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque while the...

Former US President Bill Clinton has revealed that during the Camp David negotiations, which took place in 2000 between then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and then-Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Israel had expressed its willingness to hand over control of Al-Aqsa Mosque to the Palestinians in return for Israeli control...

US Senators Mark Kirk and Marco Rubio of the Republican Party on Thursday called on Secretary of State John Kerry to publically declare that the US will immediately cut off its financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority should a Palestinian consensus government fail to recognise Israel’s right to exist...

The United States is disappointed with US ally Bahrain’s decision to sign an agreement to cooperate on investment with Russia at a time when American and European governments impose sanctions on Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine, a US State Department official said Wednesday. “With Russia continuing its efforts...

Official figures reveal that more than 1,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed in sporadic incidents of violence across Iraq in April, the health, defence and interior ministries revealed yesterday. The figures show that of the 1,009 people killed, 881 were civilians, 76 were military personal and 52 were police...

Below is a press statement from ITN Solicitors. On Friday 25th April 2014 the ICC prosecutor, Mrs Fatou Besouda, informed the democratically elected government of Egypt that the complaint submitted by them detailing serious allegations of international crimes cannot proceed. Representatives of the democratically elected Government were notified of...

Workers in the Gaza Strip did not know that today marks International Labour Day. Some of them expressed their misery and their need for work, others said it was a day like any other as workers take a holiday on this day, however in Gaza they have been on...

It requires killing. I say killing, every terrorist who carries arms, or any terrorist, whether he has carried arms or not, should be killed. He should be killed. You should not wait for him to open fire on you. Kill the terrorist wherever he happens to be, inside or...

The six children of Ahmad and Roqaya Al-Khateeb move between their parents houses throughout the week, spending some of their time with their mother in Jerusalem and the remainder with their father in the West Bank. However, their story is unlike that of other families torn apart by divorce....

Two Kuwaiti members of parliament resigned in protest on Wednesday after the parliament refused to grant their request to question Kuwait’s Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Mubarak Al-Sabah over allegations that he gave cash handouts to lawmakers. During the National Assembly’s session on Wednesday, Riyadh Al-Adasani and Abdulkarim Al-Kundari called...

The official Facebook page for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised eyebrows on Tuesday when it published photos of a meeting between interim Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy and leaders of Jewish American organisations. The ministry’s page explained that the meeting focused on the future of US-Egyptian relations and how...

Haitham Abu Khalil, an Egyptian human rights lawyer, said that 20,000 Egyptian political prisoners will extend their hunger strike which they started on Wednesday till Friday, in protest against mistreatment and torture inside prisons. Khalil, a spokesperson for the “Egyptian Detainees of Freedom” movement, said that prisoners will extend...

Voting on the proposed electoral law at the Tunisian National Constituent Assembly has been suspended after heated arguments triggered by MPs’ refusal of an article that bans candidacy of leaders of the ousted regime. Chapter 167 of the bill stipulates that any person who previously held responsibility at the...

Leader of the April 6 Youth Movement Ahmed Maher said in a leaked letter from his jail that public figures’ support to the coup leader Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi will not protect them. Maher slammed a number of pro-coup figures who endorsed Sisi, including members of the secular coalition that formed...

A foreign relations official at the Freedom and Justice Party, Mohmed Soudan, said that Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and coup leaders have recently hired two firms in the UK and US to defend them against potential international prosecution. Soudan’s statements came in contrast to Egyptian media claims that the International Criminal...

Families of three former Egyptian presidents have announced their endorsement of Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi for presidency. Family of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who ruled Egypt between 1956 and 1970, announced its support for Sisi at a meeting attended by Nasser’s son Abdelhakeem, who joined socialist and Nasserist leaders on April...

A report on Terrorism published by the US State Department Wednesday hailed the performance of Palestinian security agencies as well as Egypt’s efforts in countering smuggling of weapons to Gaza. According to the report, “Israeli authorities, among others, have noted continuing improvements in the capacity and performance of PASF...

Palestinian and Israeli residents in nine Jerusalem neighbourhoods were warned by Israel’s Ministry of Health and the Gihon Water Company on Wednesday to be cautious of drinking tap water because of fears it might be contaminated. The nine neighbourhoods include: Abu Tor, Silwan, Zur Baher, Ras Al-Amud, the Old...

Egypt’s interim Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmi said on Wednesday that, despite its sensitive relations with Hamas, his country still supports the Palestinian national reconciliation if it reinforces the broader effort to reach peace between the Arabs and Israel. Relations between Cairo and Hamas deteriorated after the military coup last...

The head of Hamas’s political bureau Khaled Meshaal has called for devising a unified national strategy involving all the different factions to agree upon a common ground that upholds three fundamental principles: turning the page of division, confronting the Israeli occupation and achieving the objectives of the Palestinian people....

The only solution to Syria’s three year war is to use military force to overthrow President Bashar Al-Assad then opposing parties can negotiate a political solution, the head of the opposition said. Ahmad Al-Jarba, president of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces told London-based newspaper Asharq...

American military aid to Egypt lost Senate support in the wake of the mass death sentences issued by the Minya Criminal Court, American newspapers reported yesterday Chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said that he would not support additional military aid to...

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas should permanently join the International Labour Organisation and sign all its conventions, Secretary General of Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) Shaher Sa’ad said yesterday. At a press conference in its headquarters in Ramallah on the eve of International Workers’ Day, the...

Gaza’s Ark, a boat docked at a fishing harbour in Gaza, exploded yesterday, the spokesperson for the ship Mahfouz Kabariti told AFP. “The guard received an anonymous call that the boat would explode in a few minutes. The explosion caused great damage to the boat and it partly sank,”...

Saudi forces conducted on Tuesday their largest military drills to date, which were carried out in front of foreign officials along the Saudi borders with Iraq and Kuwait. The drills were described by the Saudi media as the “largest ever” in the history of the Kingdom. Saudi newspaper Arab...

US lawmakers warned yesterday that US might freeze its annual aid to the Palestinian Authority if the Islamic Resistance movement Hamas joined a national consensus government. Assistant Secretary for the Near East Anne Patterson said during a congress hearing that the US administration will not provide financial assistance for...

Gunmen attacked Libya’s parliament on Tuesday forcing lawmakers to postpone the second round of voting to choose the country’s new prime minister. In the first round of voting, businessman Ahmed Maiteeq placed first out of the seven candidates running, taking 67 votes. His rival Omar Al-Hassi from Benghazi city...

At least 9,000 candidates are competing over the Iraqi parliament’s 328 seats in the country’s first legislative elections since US troops withdrew three years ago. Nearly 21 million of the country’s 35 million Iraqis are expected to cast their vote after expatriate Iraqis, members of the security forces, the...

Egyptian activist and blogger Bassem Sabry has reportedly died after he went into a diabetic seizure and fell off a 10th floor balcony yesterday, social media reports claim. Sabry, 31, was a member of the political communication committee of Hamdeen Sabbahi’s presidential election campaign. He was also a member...

According to Al-Amat online news site, Saudi Arabia has intercepted communications between the office of Abu-Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed Bin-Zayed and former Palestinian national security advisor Mohamed Dahlan about plans to orchestrate a mass media campaign aimed at sabotaging relations between Doha and Riyadh. Dahlan fled to the...

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry called on the world to respect the independence of its judiciary. Badr Abdel-Atti, the spokesman for the ministry, said in a statement: “All countries of the world should understand that the Egyptian judiciary is completely independent. “We cannot comment on court verdicts. Democracy’s principles entail...

German newspapers condemned the mass death sentences handed down by the Egyptian Minya Criminal Court on Monday, dismissing them as politically motivated. The Zuddeutsche Zeitung newspaper stated that the Egyptian regime returned to “old brutal methods” of dealing with opponents. It stressed that “no side will emerge victorious from...

US Secretary of State John Kerry vaguely described the mass death sentences as “disturbing”. At a press conference with his Egyptian counterpart Tuesday, Kerry said that despite “positive steps” taken by the interim government, “there have been disturbing decisions within the judicial process. The court system does have very...

Oil prices surged on Tuesday as traders reacted to yet another outbreak of violence in Libya and the continued unrest in Ukraine. The price of oil had registered its lowest point in a month on Monday when Libya reopened Zueitina, an oil port city in the east of the...

The reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah will not lead Hamas to recognise Israel’s right to exist or for armed groups to be controlled by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’ senior leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar said yesterday. Al-Zahar said that his movement is waiting for Abbas to form...

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is to issue a presidential decree asking the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to resume its work immediately after the formation of a national unity government, the head of Fatah’s PLC bloc, Azzam Al-Ahmad, announced on Tuesday. Al-Ahmad, who is also responsible for contacts...