Category Archives: Middle East and North Africa

‘Get out of here’: thousands in Israel call for Netanyahu to resign

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Anger continues to build over prime minister’s handling of coronavirus crisis and corruption allegations

Thousands of Israelis protested outside the official residence of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night, pressing ahead with a months-long campaign demanding he resign.

Demonstrators have been protesting against Netanyahu’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, which has led to soaring unemployment, and believe he should step down while on trial for corruption charges.

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Kosovo and Serbia give Israel diplomatic boon after US-brokered deal

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Majority-Muslim Kosovo will recognise Jewish state, while Serbia promises to relocate embassy to Jerusalem

Israel scored two diplomatic gains on Friday when majority-Muslim Kosovo agreed to recognise the Jewish state and Serbia said it would move its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

The decisions came after a White House-brokered agreement between the two Balkan arch-rivals to normalise economic relations two decades after they fought a bitter war.

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A city in need of miracles: few glimmers of hope in Beirut’s reconstruction effort

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Business is strong for glaziers but the mood among most rescuers and residents is sombre

Working 13 hours a day for more than a month, Ghassan Awad has driven trucks carrying glass panels from Beirut’s southern suburbs to the ruins of its waterfront.

He has not been so busy since the 2006 war with Israel. Nor have all Lebanon’s other glaziers, who have been at the frontline of making the capital inhabitable in the 31 days since the massive explosion that killed 190 people, injured more than 6,000 and ripped the city apart.

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Libyan warlord faces legal action in US for alleged war crimes

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Khalifa Haftar challenged in Virginia by relatives of military leader’s alleged victims

A $50m damages claim lodged in a court in Virginia alleges that the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, who holds US citizenship, is guilty of war crimes including starvation sieges that forced families to eat grass and tree bark to survive.

The claim against Haftar by two relatives of his alleged victims is an attempt to make him answerable somewhere for the crimes he is accused of perpetrating as head of the Libyan National Army, the major military force in the east of the country, which since 2014 has been in conflict with the Tripoli-based government in the west.

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Possible sign of life detected under Beirut rubble weeks after blast

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Search renewed after pulsing signal that may be heartbeat heard under collapsed building

A pulsing signal has been detected from under the rubble of a building that collapsed in the Beirut port explosion last month, raising faint hopes that there may be a survivor there.

A sniffer dog belonging to a Chilean search and rescue team first detected something in rubble of a building that had previously been searched. The team then used audio equipment to listen for a possible heartbeat, and detected what could be a pulse of 18 to 19 beats per minute.

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Trump’s tweets are felt in Ethiopia. Washington should use its power wisely | Mekonnen Firew Ayano

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Anti-democratic attitudes in America helped to scrub our election, while US-Nile geopolitics could become a powder keg

When US presidents comment on events in other countries, their remarks have impact.

When, for example, President Barack Obama congratulated the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) on an apparent landslide election victory in 2015, it signalled to some Ethiopians that the world’s most powerful country would not favour a legal challenge to the election results.

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‘I am starving’: the migrant workers abandoned by Dubai employers

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With no salary or money to pay for flights home, many are trapped in desperate situations in crowded labour camps

Hassan doesn’t know if he will eat today. The 30-year-old Pakistani has lived in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), for over a decade, employed as a construction worker. But when the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, he lost his job. Without his salary he cannot afford to live in the UAE. Nor can he afford to fly home.

“The suffering is too much. We hardly have any food and there’s no support. Since we don’t have any money, we can’t travel from here either,” he says. “How are we going to buy the ticket?”

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‘A race against time’: the new law putting Somalia’s children at risk of marriage

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Child marriage in the country has increased during coronavirus – and now a newly-tabled bill would allow children as young as 10 to marry

Fardowsa Salat Mohamed was 15 when her cousin asked her parents for her hand in marriage. Her father did not hesitate to say yes. When Mohamed objected, her father asked her to choose between “a curse and a blessing”.

“That was not a choice for me, I was basically forced,” she says. “No girl would ever choose to be cursed by her parents so I had to accept the marriage,”

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s every step being followed inside prison in Iran

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Sources say authorities make two prisoners follow the British Australian academic everywhere in the Covid-ravaged Qarchak jail

Kylie Moore-Gilbert has enough money to buy food and water inside Iran’s notorious Qarchak prison, but is closely surveilled everywhere she goes, sources inside the jail say.

Fellow prisoners report that the British Australian academic appears to have so far escaped infection in the wave of Covid-19 sweeping through the prison, but that her communications with the outside world are strictly proscribed, according to Roya Boroumand, executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center (ABC) for Human Rights in Iran.

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Vaccine-derived polio spreads in Africa after defeat of wild virus

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Fresh cases of disease linked to oral vaccine seen in Sudan, following outbreak in Chad

A new polio outbreak in Sudan has been linked to the oral polio vaccine that uses a weakened form of the virus.

News of the outbreak comes a week after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that wild polio had been eradicated in Africa.

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Macron visits Lebanese singer in bid to change political soundtrack

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French leader meets Fairouz, 85, amid frustration with ruling class unwilling to change

The French president had tried it all before: rebuking his counterpart, cajoling ministers, withholding aid and imploring the Lebanese ruling class to change its ways in order to save the country.

This time Emmanuel Macron arrived in Beirut with a different approach – a visit to one of the country’s most unifying figures. His first port of call was to the home of the illustrious singer, Fairouz, whose songs of loss and lament have been a soundtrack to Lebanese life for more than 50 years.

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New employment law effectively ends Qatar’s exploitative kafala system

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Workers will be able switch jobs without employers’ permission, but rights groups say measure does not go far enough

Workers in Qatar may now change jobs without needing to obtain their employers’ permission, ending one of the most criticised elements of the country’s labour system.

The government has also announced an increase in the minimum wage, but rights groups have said the measure does not go far enough, leaving low wage workers earning as little as £1 an hour.

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Hamas and Israel agree end to cross-border bombing in Gaza

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A Qatari-brokered truce commits Israel to easing its 13-year-old blockade of the Palestinian territory

Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas have announced they have reached a Qatari-mediated deal with Israel to end more than three weeks of cross-border exchanges of fire.

After talks with Qatari envoy Mohammed al-Emadi, “an understanding was reached to rein in the latest escalation and end [Israeli] aggression against our people,” said the office of the Palestinian territory’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar.

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Sudan government agrees to peace deal with five rebel groups

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Pact covers security, land ownership, power sharing and return of displaced people

Sudan’s government has agreed to a peace deal with five rebel groups in a move seen by observers as a significant step towards resolving multiple deep-rooted civil conflicts that have caused immense suffering in the country for decades.

The agreement will provide a welcome boost to the transitional government that took power after the fall of the authoritarian ruler Omar al-Bashir last year.

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Inside Somalia: how Covid-19 created a perfect storm in a humanitarian crisis

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Covid could be ‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back’ health workers warn. Photographers Fardosa Hussein and Ismail Taxta captured a country battling seemingly insurmountable odds

Considering the country was in the middle of a pandemic, the silence at the entrance to Mogadishu’s De Martini hospital felt almost numbing, the expected noise replaced by stillness in its deserted, sanitised halls.

It sent a chill through me as I arrived in May to capture the work being done at what was, until recently, the Somali capital’s only hospital taking coronavirus patients. It felt like a prison.

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Beirut blast: support grows for ambassador to become Lebanon’s next PM

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Mustapha Adib, the ambassador to Germany, is backed by four former prime ministers as French president flies in to press for new political pact

Lebanon’s ambassador to Germany could become the crisis-stricken country’s next prime minister after getting the support of senior Sunni politicians.

Mustapha Adib was named by four former prime ministers on the eve of binding consultations between the president and parliamentary blocs on their choice for the post.

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Libya peace-building efforts in doubt amid government infighting

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PM suspends interior minister over claims he acted unlawfully by supporting street protests

A power struggle in Libya’s UN-backed government that erupted over street protests has raised fears about the future of fragile peace-building efforts after its prime minister, Fayez al-Sarraj, said the interior minister had acted unlawfully in giving his backing to the calls for improved living standards.

The surprise developments, unfolding over the past week, move Libya away from a carefully planned UN-backed move to build on a ceasefire and plans to resume oil production agreed a fortnight ago.

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Palestine: 1947 escape from British prison exposed as inside job

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Exclusive: architect leaked plans to Jewish militants leading to raid seen as signifying London’s declining control

The family of a decorated British civil servant who built a notorious jail for the empire in Palestine has revealed he leaked the building plans to Jewish militants, helping them to launch a legendary prison break in 1947.

The storming of Acre prison has been credited as a critical event that led to the British decision to end what was increasingly viewed as an onerous mandate in Palestine. Until now, details of how the highly sophisticated operation was so successful had remained elusive.

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UN refugee agency calls on EU nations to let in migrants rescued in Mediterranean

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UNHCR and IOM say 200 rescued people urgently need to get off Banksy-funded ship

The UN refugee agency urged European nations on Saturday to let in hundreds of migrants rescued from the Mediterranean by humanitarian boats, including one financed by the British street artist Banksy.

The UNHCR and the International Organization of Migration (IOM) said more than 200 rescued refugees and migrants needed immediately to get off the nonprofit search-and-rescue ship Louise Michel, saying it was far beyond its safe capacity.

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Sexual assault, forced labor, wage theft: garment workers in Jordan suffer for US brands

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Activist groups work towards improving labor conditions in textile factories but abolishing the industry’s ‘norms’ is an uphill battle

Mehedi Mehedi, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi garment worker who had spent 14 years working in Jordan, left the country forever last December. It was not an easy decision to make: Mehedi had met his wife in Jordan, he had no guarantees of finding a job back in Bangladesh, and he was desperate to work in order to support his chronically ill father.

In Jordan, Mehedi had been working for a subcontracting factory that supplies apparel to brands like Ralph Lauren, Under Armour, and American Eagle. But after spending his last six months without regular pay, he had reached a breaking point.

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