The Russian Ambassador to Tehran, Levan Dzhagaryan, yesterday denied media reports claiming Moscow was displeased with the recent visit of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to Iran saying “we were never worried about this visit”. Dzhagaryan described the media reports about Moscow’s displeasure with Al-Assad’s visit as “baseless”, Russia Today...

Waleed Al-Hathloul, the brother of detained Saudi activist, Loujain Al-Hathloul has addressed the US Congress again about the circumstances of his sister’s detention in Saudi Arabia. In his testimony, Waleed said his sister is being subjected to torture and sexual harassment, adding that there are attempts to cover it...

The United States granted Iraq a 90-day waiver exempting it from sanctions to buy energy from Iran, a State Department official said on Wednesday, the latest extension allowing Baghdad to keep purchasing electricity from its neighbour, Reuters reports. The official said the waiver was granted on Tuesday. The last waiver...

The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday summoned Hungarian ambassador Shaba Rada to protest the opening of a diplomatic trade office in Jerusalem, says Anadolu Agency. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry said the diplomat was summoned to express “indignation and anger” over the Hungarian move to open the office in...

Egypt has no conditions for restoring Syria’s membership in the Arab League, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri said on Wednesday. “Egypt has no condition for Syria’s return to the Arab League,” Shoukri said in response to a question during a visit to Oman, according to the official Omani news agency....

US lawmakers criticized the government Wednesday for its decision to invade Iraq 16 years ago, questioning the conflict’s legitimacy, reports Anadolu Agency. Politicians called the invasion disastrous, saying it led to the country’s destruction and affected America’s global standing. “Sixteen years ago, the US illegally invaded Iraq, leaving a...

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Iran on Wednesday denied Israeli reports that Iranian intelligence had hacked several Israeli politicians’ cellphones. “These irrelevant claims to create a hostile atmosphere against Iran,” Bahram Qasimi, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, told official Iranian News Agency IRNA. Israeli media reported earlier that Iran had hacked the phone of...

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Wednesday Foreign Minister Winston Peters will travel to Turkey to “confront” comments made by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on the killing of 50 people at mosques in Christchurch, says Reuters. Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, was charged with...

France, one of the main contributors to the fight against Daesh in the Middle East, has received no answers to questions about the US calls for it and others to help secure northeastern Syria, its foreign minister said on Wednesday, reports Reuters. Defence Minister Florence Parly was in Washington...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showcased his close relationship with the Trump administration on Wednesday, hosting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo three weeks before an Israeli election, says Reuters. Washington’s announcement that President Donald Trump, a popular figure among Israelis, had invited Netanyahu to the White House for...

Qatar has called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to intervene in a dispute over a $24 billion nuclear power plant which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is building. Relations between Qatar and its neighbour are already strained after the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain severed diplomatic,...

Israeli occupation forces arrested a 22-year-old Palestinian woman at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron after she posted a comment on Facebook on Al-Aqsa Mosque. Isra’a Hammad Abu Sneineh was detained at the Abu Al-Rish military checkpoint near the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. According...

More than 200 people attended the eleventh student conference for Palestine in London over the weekend, declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. Organised by Olive, a British Palestinian youth organisation, and the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) in partnership with the Palestinian Students Forum, took place in...

Coordination usually occurs between equal or comparative parties, or parties that are similar in strength, weight and competency. Coordination also takes place between parties that share common interests in order to have mutual benefit, as is the case usually with political, economic, military and security coordination between countries and...

The US has faced another set-back in its attempt to isolate Iran following the decision by Washington to issue another 90 days sanctions waiver to Iraq, allowing Baghdad to continue to purchase energy from Tehran. Mindful not to destabilise the war-torn country increasingly reliant on Iranian gas and electricity,...

White House official Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan “once included a massive land swap proposal in which the Palestinians would get Jordanian land and Jordan would get Saudi Arabian land”, reported the Times of Israel. The claims are made as part of a new book published this week...

The UK government will help lead a review into Palestinian Authority (PA) school textbooks, according to a press release by the Department for International Development. “After calls by the UK government for international action on education materials, a group of international partners, including the UK will lead a review...

Former Israeli minister Moshe Ya’alon, whose Telem party forms part of the Blue and White election list, has told right-wing news site Arutz Sheva that the list has chosen not to focus on relations with the Palestinians, in its efforts to remove Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power. “We...

Students at more than 30 UK universities are taking action on their campuses today “to protest their institutions’ complicity in Israel’s violations of human rights”, according to a press release by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). The national day of action occurs during the internationally-observed Israeli Apartheid Week, and...

On 4 March, the newly formed Israeli Blue and White party’s leaders, Gabi Ashkenazi, Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz and Moshe Ya’alon, declared that Israel will not pull out from the occupied Golan Heights. Gantz, the party head, said they would increase settlements and double the population. Their reason; they...

Saudi students in the US are being constantly spied on by the government in Riyadh, a PBS NewsHour report has found. Intelligence experts and Saudi students interviewed by the American daily evening television news programme said that the Saudi government closely monitored students when they leave to study in...

Two Palestinians have been killed after hundreds of Israeli settlers stormed Joseph’s Tomb near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. The pair were identified as 21-year-old Ra’ed Hamdan and 20-year-old Ziyad Nuri from the West Bank city of Nablus. They were killed early this morning by the Israeli army...

The Syrian government has deployed troops to the southern city of Daraa after receiving the green light to launch a large-scale operation against opposition cells, state news agency Al-Masdar reported yesterday. The military arrived at the Al-Balad axis in the provincial capital and to the outskirts of the town...

Former Shin Bet Chief, Israel internal security agency, Yuval Diskin said he expects the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to explode, local media reported. He said that the Palestinians in both the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip have lost hope and this would...

Arab MK and Chairman of the Arab-majority Balad party Jamal Zahalka yesterday filed a complaint against Jewish MK from the Likud party Oren Hazan for incitement to murder, Haaretz reported. As part of his electoral campaign, Hazan published a video from the American film “The Good, the Bad and...

Head of the Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) alliance Benny Gantz has labelled Israel’s predominantly Arab political parties “irrelevant” ahead of the upcoming election, ruling out cooperation. Speaking during a series of televised interviews yesterday, Gantz said: “I don’t intend to cooperate with those who go against the State...

UNRWA Operations Director in Gaza Matthias Shamali said yesterday that the international organisation would not take measures to ensure employee job security due to the financial crisis it is facing, Safa news agency reported. Shamali met with the Coordinator of the Joint Committee of Refugees Mahmoud Khalaf and discussed the...

The so-called Temple Mount Groups, a body of extremist Jewish organisations, have called for massive raid of Al-Aqsa Mosque to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim tomorrow, the Shehab news agency reported yesterday. According to Shehab, the groups announced their planned raid on Facebook and said that they would...

Israeli Minister of Construction and Housing Yoav Galant along with Mayor of Ariel Eli Shaviro yesterday laid the cornerstone of new a settlement project comprising 839 settlement units in the illegal settlement, Arab48 reported. The new project is expected to attract hundreds of young settler families to the second largest Israeli settlement in...

Syrian activists in the province of Deir Ez-Zor said Iran has been purchasing properties in areas controlled by the Syrian regime in the province. Activist and director of the Deir Ez-Zor 24 network, Omar Abu Layla said representatives of Iranian figures have been purchasing shops and real estate in...

Israel deprives Palestinians of benefiting from natural resources of water which constitutes a “violation of legal responsibilities as an occupying power,” Special UN Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Occupied Palestinian Territory Michael Lynk said. “For nearly five million Palestinians living under occupation, the degradation of their...

Omani Foreign Minister Yousuf Bin Alawi remarked on the arrest of an Emirati spying cell in the country saying “these things happen between neighbours”. Bin Alawi was asked during a lecture on foreign relations held at the Cultural Club in Muscat about the UAE espionage cell arrested nearly three...

An Egyptian court had extended the detention of the daughter of prominent Muslim scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and her husband for 45 more days, bringing the period they have spent in pretrial detention to 630 days. This is the 14th time Ola Qaradawi and her husband Hossam Khalaf have had...

An influential Algerian party that was a long-time supporter of Abdelaziz Bouteflika has criticised the ailing president for seeking to stay in power, as mass demonstrations calling for the end of his rule continue. The National Rally for Democracy (RND), a member of the ruling coalition, has joined ruling...

US federal agents are investigating Elliott Broidy, a top fundraiser for the Republican party and President Donald Trump, over his relations to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Investigative journalism site ProPublica reported that federal agents raided Broidy’s office in Los Angeles last summer looking for evidence...

Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday called on Egyptian authorities to locate the disclose the whereabouts of former parliamentarian Mostafa Al-Nagar who has been missing “for nearly five months”. “The Egyptian authorities should exert serious efforts to find and reveal the whereabouts of Mostafa Al-Nagar,” HRW said. The rights organisation pointed...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Algerian people will determine their fate based on their constitution and in line with the principles of international law. during a joint press conference with Algerian Deputy Prime Minister, Ramtane Lamamra, Lavrov praised the joint cooperation between the two countries in the...

The United States (US) is angry over the Egyptian army’s interference into the local business activity across various sectors, diplomatic sources reported yesterday. The sources told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that some members of the US’ Republican and Democratic parties had recently met at the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt,...

Israel on Tuesday asked 26 countries for support against a UN vote that singles out its violation of international human rights and humanitarian law in the occupied Gaza Strip, according to local media, Anadolu reports. Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz wrote in a letter to the countries not to vote in...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strongest election rival, former army general Benny Gantz, said on Tuesday he would seek peace with the Palestinians but stopped short of endorsing their goal for statehood, Reuters reports. Gantz said in an interview with Hadashot TV news that Israel has a moral obligation to...

New Zealand has become part of the Jordanian debate lately. In the past, the name of this remote and quiet country was only mentioned at butchers when they offer you either a locally reared lamb or one from New Zealand, slaughtered in Jordan or Dubai. This time, the massacre...

Former Algerian Prime Minister Ali Benflis said President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s recent message, in which he stressed his commitment to a road map to overcome the crisis, “has gone beyond all the limits of provocation and defiance.” This came in a statement issued by Benflis, one of the most prominent...

The Lebanese security authority arrested a Lebanese citizen of Canadian nationality on charges of conspiring with the Israeli intelligence service, according to a statement issued by the Lebanese authorities. A public security statement stated that the accused person, “F.J”, born in 1978, was arrested by order of the Military...

The French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian lauded the “great progress” made in southern Libya by Libya’s National Army Chief Marshal Khalifa Haftar, pointing out at the same time that there is no military solution to the Libyan crisis. Le Drian said during a visit to the Libyan capital...

Russian Defence Minister and President of the Russian Geographical Society (RGO), Sergey Shoigu announced that his country would hand over files related to the restoration of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) including a three-dimensional model within a month...

President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on New Zealand to restore the death penalty for the gunman who killed 50 people at two Christchurch mosques, warning that Turkey would make the attacker pay for his act if New Zealand did not, Reuters reports. Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected...

An airliner caught fire on landing at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport on Tuesday but all 100 passengers were evacuated without injury, the head of Iran’s emergency department said on state television, Reuters reports. A video posted by the Islamic Republic News Agency showed flames and sparks shooting out from the...

The proposed constitutional amendments in Egypt and their impacts on people were discussed at a seminar held in Istanbul on Tuesday, Anadolu reports. The Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University (IZU) hosted the seminar titled “New Constitutional Amendments in Egypt: Causes and Consequences.”...

At least 299 schoolchildren and 30 staff members of the Palestinian Education Ministry remain in Israeli prisons, Palestine’s Education Minister said Tuesday, Anadolu reports. Sabri Saidam told reporters in Ramallah that 47 students had been martyred in 2018 with 3,191 injured by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem....