Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli authorities on Monday demolished four Palestinian homes in annexed East Jerusalem that had been built without construction permits, a security official and residents said.

A total of 20 people lived in the four buildings, two of them located in the Issawiya neighbourhood and two in Beit Hanina, occupants told AFP.

They had been served demolition orders because they did not have the necessary construction permits, security spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP.

She added the demolitions went ahead without incident.

The Palestinian governor of Jerusalem, Adnan Al Husseini, told official Voice of Palestine radio it was an attempt to “isolate these areas” from the rest of Arab East Jerusalem.

Husseini also lamented the Supreme Court’s rejection Sunday of a petition against constructing a highway that would link Jerusalem to the southern settlement blocs of Gush Etzion and Har Homa, cutting right through the Palestinian town of Beit Safafa.

In 2013, Israel destroyed 99 buildings in annexed east Jerusalem, leaving 298 people homeless, according to United Nations humanitarian affairs agency OCHA.

Palestinians and human rights groups in the city say Israel rarely grants the permits, forcing residents to build homes without them.

Israel defines the whole of Jerusalem as its “eternal and indivisible” capital, while the Palestinians claim the eastern sector, captured during the 1967 war and unilaterally annexed shortly after, as the capital of the state to which they aspire.

TRIPOLI — Libya’s prime minister said Monday five Egyptian diplomats kidnapped in Tripoli and freed as part of an apparent prisoner swap will return to their homeland “in a few hours”.

Kidnappers snatched four Egyptian diplomats in Tripoli on Saturday, the day after another member of the embassy in the city was taken.

The abductions came after a prominent commander in Libya’s 2011 rebellion that ousted dictator Muammar Qadhafi was arrested in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

All five were freed late on Sunday, Libya’s foreign ministry said.

On Monday, Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said they would return home soon.

“The freed Egyptian diplomats will travel to Egypt in a few hours,” Zeidan told a news conference.

The kidnappings came shortly after the arrest in Alexandria of Shaaban Hadeia, leader of the 2011 uprising.

Hadeia, head of the Operations Centre of Libya’s Thuwar, a group of ex-rebels that fought Qadhafi, announced his release himself on television.

A security source in Tripoli told AFP the kidnappers freed the diplomats as part of a deal between Libya and Egypt.

Zeidan said the kidnapping had “tarnished the image of Libya, now considered a country that does not respect international laws”.

But he added the incident “will not affect relations” between the countries, saying the Egyptian mission’s staff, who left Libya after the kidnappings, would return to Tripoli soon.

Libya’s authorities have struggled to stamp their authority on the mostly desert nation since the 2011 revolt, with some rebel groups that helped overthrow Qadhafi forming powerful armed militias.

Some of these groups have carved out their own fiefdoms, each with its own ideology and regional allegiances.

Zeidan was himself briefly kidnapped by a militia last year.

CAIRO — Egypt Sunday announced early presidential election likely to anoint the general who overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, as the country reeled after a weekend of violence killed dozens of people.

Interim president Adli Mansour declared the poll in a televised address, a day after 49 people died in clashes between Islamist protesters and police and thousands rallied in Cairo in support of military chief General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

Sisi was expected to announce his candidacy for the election, scheduled before mid-April, after a show of support including the large rally in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

But the weekend clashes and bombings also highlighted the interim government’s precarious grip seven months after Morsi’s overthrow.

The violence came as Egypt commemorated the 2011 uprising that overthrew veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak, leading to three years of tumult that many hope Sisi’s election will end.

Over Friday and Saturday, six bombs exploded in Cairo and the canal city of Suez, killing six people and wounding dozens in an escalation of a militant campaign Mansour has pledged to eradicate.

Separately, 49 people were killed in clashes when police clamped down on protests by Morsi’s Islamist supporters and anti-military activists, the health ministry said.

As Mansour addressed the nation to announce the early presidential election, relatives of those killed on Saturday assembled outside a Cairo morgue, chanting anti-military slogans.

“Down with the military! The people want to topple the regime!” they chanted outside the Zeinhom morgue as they collected the corpses of loved ones.

Police in the capital bolstered defences outside their buildings and closed access roads after the weekend bombings that all targeted police facilities.

In his address, Mansour, a judge the military appointed as interim president to replace Morsi, pledged to “uproot [terrorists] and show them no mercy”.

The government says a series of polls that started with a constitutional referendum in January and will end in parliamentary elections will restore an elected government by 2015.

A parliamentary election had been scheduled ahead of the presidential poll, but Mansour said on Sunday he had revised the timetable following many demands.

A presidential election first may allow Sisi, if he stands, to influence the outcome of parliamentary elections by forming a party that would attract leading candidates.

But Sisi, accused by Morsi supporters of carrying out a coup ending the Islamist’s single year in power, still faces a determined opposition and a semi-insurgency.

Hours before Mansour spoke, militants ambushed a bus carrying soldiers in the restive Sinai Peninsula, killing four troops.

And an Al Qaeda-inspired group in the peninsula claimed it had shot down a military helicopter on Saturday, in what the army said was an “accident” that killed five soldiers.

The group, Ansar Beit Al Maqdis, had earlier claimed responsibility for the bombings in the capital.

Security stepped up

The attacks, starting with a car bomb that killed four people outside Cairo police headquarters on Friday morning, underscored the resilience of the Sinai-based militants who had tried to assassinate the police chief in September.

Police sealed off several main squares in Cairo on Sunday and used metal barriers to block roads leading to police stations.

In December, a car bombing outside a police building north of Cairo killed 15 people, prompting the interim government to blacklist Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood Movement as a terrorist group.

That bombing was also claimed by Ansar Beit Al Maqdis.

The Brotherhood’s blacklisting, despite its condemnation of the attack, was seen as an extension of a crackdown on Morsi supporters that has killed more than a thousand people and jailed thousands more.

Police said they arrested at least 1,000 protesters on Saturday alone.

The government and the military now rule out dealing with the Brotherhood, which had won every election following Mubarak’s overthrow in the 2011 popular uprising.

The government says the group, which renounced violence decades ago in favour of electoral politics, is linked to the militant attacks, and Morsi himself is facing trial on terrorism-related charges.

Morsi’s followers insist that he be reinstated, and have called for further protests in the days ahead.

BAGHDAD — Militants appeared to have captured five Iraqi soldiers near Fallujah, according to witnesses and online videos, while anti-government fighters took control of more territory in Anbar province Sunday.

Meanwhile, attacks elsewhere in Iraq killed 13 people, pushing to more than 850 the number of people killed this month.

Authorities have been grappling for weeks with a deadly standoff in Anbar province, west of Baghdad.

Foreign leaders have urged the Shiite-led government to seek political reconciliation with disaffected minority Sunnis in order to undercut support for militants.

But with elections looming in April, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has taken a hard line.

On Sunday, witnesses said between five and 22 soldiers were captured by anti-government fighters who also seized several military vehicles.

The alleged operations were shown in videos posted on the YouTube, but their authenticity could not be immediately verified

Witnesses said that anti-government fighters attacked a small military outpost on the outskirts of Fallujah in the morning, forcing some soldiers to retreat while others surrendered.

One video shows five men dressed in Iraqi army uniforms sitting in the back of a pick-up truck as onlookers crowd around them.

The men hoist a black flag akin to those often flown by jihadists and shout slogans in support of Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Another video shows militants driving two army Humvees as Fallujah residents look on.

Witnesses said as many as six Humvees were seized, and that three were set ablaze.

Elsewhere in Anbar, militants overran police stations in Albubali and Albu Obeid, rural areas between Fallujah and nearby Ramadi, after elite security forces withdrew from the area, police officers aid.

The officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said policemen fled the area with their families after they were surrounded by anti-government fighters, and added that weapons and equipment were also left behind.

The latest unrest marks another series of setbacks for Iraqi forces who have struggled to wrest back control of Fallujah and parts of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi that have been out of government control for weeks.

Security forces have also been locked in deadly battles in Ramadi, where militants hold several neighbourhoods, and have carried out operations in rural areas between the two cities.

ISIL has been involved in the fighting, and witnesses and tribal leaders in Fallujah say the group has tightened its grip on the city in recent days. Other militant groups have also been involved in the battles.

Also in Fallujah, a mother and her three children were killed when a blast struck their home in the south of the city in the early hours of Sunday, Dr Ahmed Shami said.

It was unclear if heavy artillery or smaller rockets were responsible for the blast.

It is the first time militants have exercised such open control in Iraqi cities since the peak of the violence that followed the 2003 US-led invasion.

The protracted standoff in Anbar has forced more than 140,000 people to flee, the UN Refugee Agency said, describing this as the worst displacement in Iraq since the 2006-08 sectarian conflict.

Elsewhere in Iraq Sunda, nine people were killed in gun and bomb attacks, officials said.

Three apparently coordinated car bombs struck Kirkuk, a disputed ethnically-mixed city in north Iraq, killing four people. Attacks in and around Baghdad left four more dead, including a former army general.

In the main northern city of Mosul, a tribal leader was gunned down in his car.

The latest bloodshed pushed the overall death toll for the month above 850 — more than three times the toll for January 2013, according to an AFP tally.

RAMALLAH — The controversy over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a “Jewish state” is rooted in the clashing historical narratives of the decades-old conflict.

Palestinians have dismissed the demand, pointing to the fact that they recognised Israel in 1993 at the start of the peace process and insisting it’s not for other nations to define a state’s national or religious character.

Israeli President Shimon Peres, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, reportedly agrees, and this week was said to have called the request “unnecessary”.

But Netanyahu insists the demand gets to the very heart of the conflict, which he says is the refusal of Arabs to accept the right of Jews to a nation-state in the Middle East.

For Israel, the Zionist dream was realised in 1948, but for the Palestinians that year brought the “Nakbeh,” or catastrophe, when 760,000 fled or were forced out of their homeland.

The Palestinians fear that accepting Israel as a “Jewish state” would amount to relinquishing the “right of return” of the refugees — who now number some five million people — and undermine the rights of Israel’s sizeable Arab minority.

The dispute was thrown into focus last weekend when the UN cultural agency suspended an exhibit tracing 3,500 years of ties between the Jewish people and the Holy Land following a complaint by 22 Arab member states that it would “impact negatively” on US-brokered peace talks relaunched last year.

In Israel, cancellation of the exhibition was seen as an Arab-led attempt to delegitimise the millenia-long Jewish connection to the land.

“It would not harm the negotiations. Negotiations are based on facts, on the truth, which is never harmful,” Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday.

The Palestinians, who view themselves as the descendants of all the various peoples who have dwelled in the Holy Land since ancient times, saw the staging of the exhibit as an attempt to delegitimise their own connection to the land.

And they view the “Jewish state” demand as a departure from the peace talks, which they say are aimed at creating a Palestinian state and ending the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that began in 1967.

“We totally reject, on principle, the demand to recognise Israel as a Jewish state,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said last Friday in Morocco.

“We reject attempts to rub out our historical narrative and to erase our collective memory,” said the Palestinian president, who himself is a refugee from 1948.

‘Obsessive-compulsive behaviour’

Senior Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said last week that Israel had succeeded in imposing its view of events on the latest peace talks, which are being steered by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

“From the Israeli point of view, recognition of the state of Israel as a Jewish state is equal to cancelling the right of return, based on [UN] Resolution 194,” he said, describing it as “an entirely new requirement”.

According to Tel Aviv daily Israel Hayom, Peres also sees Netanyahu’s position as problematic.

“In conversations held by Peres in the past weeks with senior diplomatic and political figures, he explained that this insistence by Netanyahu was ‘unnecessary’,...since it could derail the peace negotiations,” the paper wrote.

“The position of Peres is important and proves that recognition of a Jewish State is not among the final status issues,” chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told AFP, referring to core disputes over borders, Jerusalem and security arrangements.

The question of the 1948 refugees is one of the thorniest issues of the talks, with the Palestinians insisting the matter be resolved on the basis of Resolution 194, which defines principles for their “right of return”.

“We will never accept the violation of the rights of refugees, which are guaranteed by international law and international resolutions,” Abbas said.

Israel opposes the return of the refugees and their descendents, arguing that it would destroy the state’s national and religious character by making Jews a minority.

But writing in Israeli daily Haaretz, leftwing commentator Gideon Levy compared Israel to a neurotic person who constantly has to check whether a door is locked or not.

“Israel is exhibiting classic signs of obsessive-compulsive behaviour,” he wrote.

“Everything is directed to achieve the goal that was reached long ago... The prime minister invents demands that the Palestinians recognise a locked door.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was under fire Sunday from religious lawmakers following a report that his son was dating a non-Jewish woman, media said.

Norwegian newspaper Dagen reported that Yair Netanyahu, 23, was dating 25-year-old Norwegian Sandra Leikanger, currently studying in Israel.

Dagen said that at a meeting in Davos, Netanyahu had told his Norwegian counterpart Erna Solberg the two had recently holidayed in Norway.

Nissim Zeev, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday Netanyahu must “display national responsibility” as prime minister.

“It’s a big problem,” he said. “I bet it pains him.”

MP Moshe Feiglin, a hardline member of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, told The Jerusalem Post the relationship “is very unfortunate”.

The paper cited a source close to Netanyahu’s son as confirming that Leikanger is not Jewish.

The extremist Israeli organisation Lehava, which says it aims “to prevent assimilation in the Holy Land”, called on Netanyahu “to prevent this relationship”.

“Your grandchildren, as you know, will not be Jewish,” Lehava director Bentzi Gopshtain warned the Israeli premier in a Facebook post.

Judaism is traditionally matrilineal, in which a child’s religion is determined by that of its mother.

Yair is the son of Netanyahu’s third wife, Sara. Netanyahu was himself married to a non-Jewish woman, Fleur Cates, between 1981 and 1984.

Netanyahu’s office refused to comment on Yair’s reported relationship.

ROME — Thirteen Moroccan immigrants held in a migrant centre on the outskirts of Rome have sewn their lips together in the second such protest at their lengthy detention, Italian media reported Sunday.

The men, aged between 20 and 30, had already stitched their mouths shut in a week-long protest in December over their long stay in a supposedly short-term detention facility.

They had only ended that protest at the Ponte Galeria facility south of Rome after assurance that their cases would be speedily dealt with.

“It is clear that time in politics moves more slowly than it does for these people, who have gone from the drama of a difficult immigration journey to places of little dignity such as the detention centres,” said Angiolo Marroni, a state official charged with protecting prisoners’ welfare in the Lazio region.

“I hope that parliament keeps its word and quickly approves the necessary regulations to put an end to this shame,” he said.

The heavily guarded detention centre, located near Rome’s Fiumicino airport to facilitate deportations, houses around 100 illegal migrants.

The men, who used a thread from a blanket and a small needle to sew their mouths shut, all made the perilous journey from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa on overcrowded dinghies.

More than 33,000 migrants landed in Italy from January 2013 to late October — nearly three times the number for 2012. Most come from impoverished African countries but now also from Syria.

In December, the European Union condemned the “appalling” conditions at some of the country’s migrant centres, following the release of footage of naked asylum seekers being hosed down at a facility on Lampedusa.

Lampedusa hit the headlines in October when a boat laden with migrants caught fire and capsized within sight of the shore, killing 366 people in the worst Mediterranean migrant tragedy yet.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/BOSTON — Hackers broke into an Israeli defence ministry computer via an e-mail attachment tainted with malicious software that looked like it had been sent by the country’s Shin Bet secret security service, an Israeli cyber security firm said on Sunday.

Aviv Raff, chief technology officer at Seculert, said the hackers earlier this month temporarily took over 15 computers, one of them belonging to Israel’s Civil Administration that monitors Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory.

Raff told Reuters that Palestinians were suspected to be behind the cyber attack, citing similarities to a cyber assault on Israeli computers waged more than a year ago from a server in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

While the latest attack was conducted from a server in the United States, experts noticed writing and composition similarities with the earlier attack, he said.

Israeli officials declined to comment on Raff’s findings. “We are not commenting on it, we don’t respond to such reports,” said one of the officials, Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the civil administration.

There was no immediate Palestinian comment on the report.

Securlet had not determined what the hackers did after the initial infection with “Xtreme RAT” software, Raff said. “All we know is at least one computer at the civil administration was in control of the attackers; what they did we don’t know.”

The civil administration is a unit of Israel’s defence ministry that oversees the passage of goods between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories Israel occupied in a 1967 war and which Palestinians want for a state.

The administration also issues entry permits to Palestinians who work in Israel.

Raff declined to identify the other 14 computers targeted by the hackers. An Israeli source who spoke on condition of anonymity said these included companies involved in supplying Israeli defence infrastructure.

Based on Raff’s analysis the 15 computers were in the hackers’ grip for at least several days after the January 15 dispatch of the e-mail, which included an attachment about ex- Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon who had just died.

Hacking activity has surged in the Middle East over the past three years as both governments and activist groups have targeted the military, other state agencies, critical infrastructure, businesses as well as dissidents and criminal groups in order to gain information about their operations and also disrupt them.

The e-mail that burrowed into the Israeli defence ministry computer looked like it had been sent from the Shin Bet security service, Raff said.

Raff’s firm was able to “sinkhole” the operation, tricking the Xtreme RAT software into communicating with servers that Seculert controlled in order to figure out which computers were infected and to deactivate the attack.

Xtreme RAT is a remote access trojan, which gives hackers complete control of an infected machine. They can steal information, load additional malicious software onto the network or use the compromised computer as a beachhead from which to conduct reconnaissance and attempt to gain deeper access into the network, Raff said.

Word of the cyber attack came a day before a three-day Israeli cybertech conference being held in Jerusalem, and just after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plugged Israeli technological advances at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Raff denied there was any irony in the timing of his warning so soon after Netanyahu’s remarks. “Unfortunately there is no such thing as 100 per cent safety either when it comes to physical risks or information security,” he said.

BEIRUT — Syrian rebels and government troops clashed Sunday in restive districts of Damascus, a monitoring group said, as representatives of the warring sides met for peace talks in Geneva.

“Fierce fighting raged between rebels and troops in Jobar [in eastern Damascus] and the Port Said area of Qadam [in the south],” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A mortar round fired by rebels hit the city’s central Qassaa district, wounding seven people, state news agency SANA reported.

Meanwhile, troops pounded opposition-held Douma northeast of the capital, the Britain-based observatory said.

It also reported the choking siege of the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in southern Damascus by regime troops had claimed six more lives on Sunday because of food and medical shortages.

Fighting inside Syria has continued unabated as opposition and regime representatives meeting in Geneva discussed ways for aid to reach rebel-held areas besieged by government troops, especially in the central city of Homs.

UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who is mediating the Geneva talks, said the Syrian regime has agreed to allow women and children trapped in besieged areas of the city to leave.

In what appeared to be a significant breakthrough, the authorities have also agreed to allow humanitarian aid convoys in, as soon as Monday.

Hundreds of families in the Old City have lived under siege for nearly 600 days with frequent shelling and very limited supplies.

“We are calling for significant amounts of food and medical supplies, and for guarantees that women, children and wounded people evacuated from Homs’ besieged areas will not be detained,” said Abu Rami, spokesman for the Syrian Revolution General Commission in Homs.

“We asked for 60 tonnes of flour and some 40 tonnes of food. In conversations yesterday, they offered us 500 bags and 500 baskets... If we get too little food, you’ll have people killing each other for it. People are hungry here,” Abu Rami added, speaking to AFP via Skype from the besieged areas.

“We have no trust in the regime and we want guarantees, either from the UN or the International Committee of the Red Cross,” he added.

Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital and now ravaged by nearly 18 months of all-out war, was also the scene of fresh violence.

According to reports cited by the observatory, a 15-year-old boy was shot dead by an army sniper in the divided city.

His death came a day after 18 people, among them six children, were killed in an air strike targeting another opposition-held district in the city, the observatory added.

In the northeast, 26 fighters were killed in battles pitting Islamists — including Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — against Kurds near Ras Al Ain, a majority Kurdish town, said the group.

Kurdish fighters have fought fierce battles against extremist opposition groups.

ISIL sees the Kurds as “heretics” and an obstacle to setting up an Islamic “caliphate” stretching from Iraq to Syria.

In other parts of the country, rebels, including Islamists, have been fighting ISIL for three weeks.

Syria’s Kurds last week named a municipal council for one of the three majority-Kurdish regions, two months after they declared self-rule.

The conflict in Syria, that has lasted nearly three years, has killed more than 130,000 people and forced millions more to flee.

KHARTOUM — A two-day-old ceasefire in South Sudan is still not firmly in place, the foreign minister of Norway, part of the so-called Troika with Britain and the United States, said Sunday.

“We see a very shaky ceasefire”, Foreign Minister Borge Brende told AFP in an interview in the Sudanese capital.

His comments, after talks with Sudanese officials, came as the South’s government and rebels traded accusations that each had breached the ceasefire deal by attacking the other.

“Of course I’m concerned and I think what this means is we also have to establish the right monitoring tools and also verification tools so one can really assess” the extent of compliance, Brende said.

The Troika helped oversee implementation of a 2005 peace agreement which ended Sudan’s 22-year civil war and ultimately led to the South’s independence in 2011.

Since then, the Troika have continued working together supporting peace and development in Sudan and South Sudan, including through backing a regional-led initiative to end weeks of fighting.

Forces loyal to South Sudan President Salva Kiir have battled a loose coalition of army defectors and ethnic militia nominally headed by sacked vice president Riek Machar.

The seven-member East African regional bloc IGAD, which includes Sudan, mediated talks in Ethiopia between South Sudan’s two warring sides.