All Stories Archive

The Head of the Popular Committee against the Gaza Siege has accused Israel of the collective punishment of the people of Gaza in what he described as a "clear violation of all international conventions". Jamal Al-Khodary, who is an independent parliamentarian, referred specifically to Israel's ban on construction materials...

Hundreds of patients, injured people, children, elderly, pregnant women and persons with disabilities were evacuated from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said. In its statement, the Society said nearly 100 refugees were evacuated from the camp every day in cooperation with the Syrian...

British Foreign Secretary William Hague has called on Moscow to put more pressure on the Syrian regime in order to accelerate the destruction of its chemical weapons. The appeal was made during a joint press conference with Hague's German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The foreign secretary took the opportunity to...

A massive media campaign has started in Egypt against Britain's Guardian newspaper. Egyptian pro-coup media and even British-Egyptians have labelled the left-of-centre Guardian as "affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood", claiming that it is "funded by Qatar". The reason for the campaign is that on January 25, the newspaper published...

Egyptian judge Hossam El-Gheriany has defended the stances adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood before the 3 July coup, pointing out that although the Brotherhood and other political forces made a mistake by leaving Tahrir Square and the country's other protest squares on 11 February 2011, "the coup d'état against...

The Middle East will change despite opposition groups who are resisting the changes, Qatar's Foreign Minister said. The Qatar News Agency reported Khalid Bin Mohamed Al-Attiyah's remarks on the sidelines of the Munich Security and World Peace conference entitled "The Future of the Middle East". The Minister added: "The...

Israeli media outlets have been discussing the fact that Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon was present as Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke on Sunday at the Munich international security conference. The media said that this "set a precedent". The gesture was made, claimed Israel Radio, following conciliatory remarks...

Palestine's Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has said that the ideas expressed by President Mahmoud Abbas in his latest interview with the New York Times are his personal views and do not reflect the national consensus. Abbas told the newspaper that he suggested to Secretary of State John Kerry that...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has proposed to US Secretary of State John Kerry that a state of Palestine would be demilitarised, protected only by a police force. Speaking to the New York Times, he also said that Israeli forces and settlements could remain in the West Bank for five...

Below is the text from Dr Maha Azzam's Open letter to the Guardian. Sir, Mr Blair's recent comments in support of the military coup in Egypt are both misinformed and harmful. They will be interpreted by the military backed regime as an endorsement of its repressive policies. He seems...

Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper has released a report revealing that the Foreign Ministry has acknowledged its inability to face the growing boycott campaign despite resorting to all political and judicial means, which have been ineffective, especially against private companies. The report explained that the ministry has succeeded in putting...

The former deputy leader of Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, Shaikh Ali Binhaj, has accused the authorities of denying him the opportunity to stand as a candidate for the presidential election. He had announced his intention to stand for president but claims to have been locked out of the building...

Western countries are going to increase the pressure on the Syrian regime for guarantees about getting humanitarian aid into the country, especially to the besieged city of Homs. A report on Aljazeera.net said that diplomats are working on a draft resolution to put to the UN Security Council to...

In a pre-emptive move, Israeli Security Minister Moshe Ya'alon attacked the Palestinian leadership and held it responsible for the expected failure of the peace negotiations. In a speech at the Munich Conference on Security, he said that Israel could muddle through without an agreement with the Palestinians, and suggested...

Israeli settlers have uprooted about 1,500 olive trees owned by Palestinians in two separate neighbourhoods in the occupied West Bank. The chief of the settlement dossier in northern West Bank, Ghassan Daglass, told local Palestinian media that settlers uprooted 425 old olive trees from a farm owned by Mohamed...

What happened in Egypt on July 30 was not a coup, the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria said. Speaking to a delegation from Britain's House of Lords and House of Commons on Sunday Pope Tawadros II said: "It was a popular revolution supported by the church...

EXCLUSIVE IMAGES The National and Islamic Committee for Palestinian Prisoners has congratulated the International Red Cross on its 150th anniversary. Representatives of the committee made their comments when they visited the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza, which is holding an exhibition of photographs of its humanitarian activities. During the...

The US denied claims by Syrian Foreign Minister Waleed Al-Moualem that America suggested conducting direct talks with the Syrian delegation in Geneva, Aljazeera.net reported on Sunday. US State Department Spokesperson Jennifer Psaki said Washington had suggested contact with Syrian officials supervised by the UN-Arab envoy Lakhdar Brahimi "on a...

PHOTOS Farmland in the 'Ain Faris area belonging to the village of Nahalin near Bethlehem have been destroyed after Israeli settlers from the illegal Beitar Illit settlement flooded fields with waste water. 'Ain Faris has a large plain and a spring that local farmers use to irrigate their land....

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has said that during the months of December and January a total of 1,900 Iraqi asylum seekers registered with its offices in Amman as refugees in Jordan, signalling a considerable increase from the monthly average of Iraqi asylum seekers in the...

Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said on Sunday that Jordan refuses to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. He added that there are no written US documents about the proposed solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict so far. In a statement to parliament about the ongoing American peace efforts and their...

EU officials have confirmed that further measures targeting Israeli settlements are prepared, with the timing of their implementation directly related to future settlement construction and the status of Kerry's diplomatic initiative. Speaking to MEMO in Brussels last week, officials in the European External Action Service (EEAS) were clear that...

The New York State Senate has overwhelmingly passed a bill that targets the American Studies Association (ASA) for supporting an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions. The bill is due to be discussed this week by the New York State Assembly's Higher Education Committee, and if passed the...

The Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said on Sunday that his meetings with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington last week did not achieve any tangible progress in the negotiations with Israel. "No specific date was set up for presenting a written draft of Kerry's proposed framework...

DEBKAfile, an Israeli military intelligence website based in Jerusalem, has argued in a report that Israel will pay a heavy price for its continued security coordination with Egypt's Minister of Defence Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. Such cooperation, predict the site's analysts, will backfire. The website pointed out that the rocket...

An official at the Foreign Ministry has admitted Israel's failure to stop European campaigns calling for economic boycotts of the state. The official made his comments after remarks by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who warned against the increase of boycott campaigns as a direct result of the...

The former Chief of Police in Dubai has called for Al-Jazeera TV Network to be shut down. It is, claimed Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, a "threat to all regimes in the Gulf, including Qatar". Tamim used his twitter account to make his allegations. Describing the television station as the "channel...

Europe's High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton has said that the EU and the Middle East Quartet will provide "unprecedented" support for the Palestinians and Israelis if they succeed in reaching an agreement. In press statements following the Quartet meeting in Munich on Saturday, Ashton said that its...

Turkey will sign a technical cooperation agreement with Jordan on Monday, the first such agreement between the two countries. Talks will also start on Monday to discuss means of boosting economic and developmental cooperation between the two countries. In particular, the discussions will look at how Turkey can assist...

A senior Fatah official has told the Iranian government that the movement reserves the right to resort to armed struggle should negotiations with Israel fail. Executive Committee member Jebreel Al-Rajoub claimed that he was passing on a message from Fatah and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas. However, Al-Rajoub's statement on...

During the three blood-soaked years of the Syrian civil war, Russia and the US have rarely seen eye to eye on the best way to tackle the crisis. A rare moment of agreement came last August, when the two countries struck a deal to remove chemical weapons from Syria....

To understand the significance of water in the Middle East we need only to glance at the driving force behind many of the intensified conflicts across the region. Whether it is Turkey's absorption of water which Iraqi farmers depend on, or Palestinians in the occupied West Bank being apportioned...

Economists and politicians have agreed that the occupation does not need to allow the Palestinian Authority (PA) to drill for oil in the West Bank at a time when sovereignty over resources is among the final status issues that still have not been resolved by negotiations. The Council of...

The latest Israeli violent incitement against Palestinians in Gaza has been distorted into the usual rhetoric of defence. Following the murder of three resistance fighters in Khan Younis by Israeli soldiers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised further violence in the wake of Palestinian retaliation against the murders. "If there...

It seems as though the decision to involve the Arab League in the campaign to demonise the Muslim Brotherhood came after Saudi Arabia entered the picture and announced that it considers the movement to be a terrorist organisation. It is the involvement of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab...

The growing strength of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement was a topic of discussion at the US House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade last week. The subcommittee's March 5 hearing was on "Threats to Israel: Terrorist Funding and Trade Boycotts". Chaired by Rep. Ted Poe...

Amidst increasing discourse regarding alleged threats to Israel's security, the US and Israel have signed an agreement deemed "of strategic value" that ensures a continuation of production for the Iron Dome air defence system. According to reports in the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post and YNet News, the...

Israeli government officials involved in monitoring and fighting BDS have claimed that the movement has "suffered several blows in recent weeks", in unattributed remarks made to Hebrew news site NRG. The examples of 'failure' cited are a mixed bag, none of them significant in the way presented by the...

In the past few decades, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made an art out of neglecting clear but disturbing realities. This is someone who drove his nation into an illegitimate war in Iraq – leaving millions of innocent civilians dead and injured – but still maintains...

"Five MBH terrorists killed and three others arrested". This was not an announcement of a pesticide company or pest control brand. This is not even an announcement by the Israeli army against Palestinians, nor is it part of a US announcement on the "War against Terrorism". Rather, it is...

Israel famously prides itself on having, in the words of Ehud Barak, "the most moral army in the world". Some of Israel's apologists even claim that accusations the country's soldiers fire on civilians, including children, are nothing more than an anti-Semitic 'blood libel'. Contrast this rhetorical bluster, however, with...

Official data revealed on Friday showed that 1,013 Iraqis were killed during the first month of this year as a result of the ongoing violence in the country. The data, which was collected by the ministry of health and interior ministry, showed that 795 of those killed were civilians...

Saudi columnist Muhanna Al-Habil has launched a strong attack on the UAE and its policies regarding Egypt. The writer accused the Emirates of setting up an axis in the Gulf in cooperation with Israel to kill Muslim Brotherhood members and ignite civil war in Egypt. In an article published...

The Egyptians for Democracy UK  condemns Tony Blair's misguided remarks on Egypt which he made in a televised interview with Sky News Arabia during his latest visit to Cairo. Mr Blair, who visited Cairo Wednesday to lend support to the post-coup regime, argued that Egypt's military-installed government wants an...

The Qatari Prime Minister Khalid Al-Attiyah has sought to distance his country from remarks made by senior Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi in which he criticised the UAE. The sheikh is resident in Qatar. Al-Attiyah, who is also Qatar's foreign minister, said that Al-Qaradawi's remarks delivered during the Friday...

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has criticised Israel for demolishing 36 Palestinian homes in the Jordan Valley and called for an immediate halt to such actions. In a statement, James Rowley expressed his "concerns" about the demolition of the houses owned by Palestinians in Ein-Al-Helwa...

An informed government source in Jordan has said that closing the borders with Iraq for security reasons has led to the suspension of oil imports to the kingdom. The Iraqis have said that they will compensate the kingdom for the oil which has not been supplied once the border...

The former Secretary General of the Arab League and President of the Committee of 50 that put the new Egyptian constitution into place has said that he believes that General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi meets all of the requirements for the post of president of Egypt. Amr Moussa claimed that...

The US State Department has accused the Syrian regime of dragging its feet on destroying its chemical weapons stockpile and called upon President Bashar Al-Assad to hand over his country's chemical weapons for destruction, as per the agreement brokered by Russia and the US. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki...

On Thursday, Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper quoted an unnamed ministerial source in the interim Egyptian government as saying that Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi's visit to Saudi Arabia next Tuesday will result in Cairo receiving a $2 billion aid package, as well as petrol supplies valued at another $2 billion. Egyptian...