Middle East & North Africa

29 Dec 2022; MEMO: Israeli occupation forces demolished 950 Palestinian homes and confiscated more than 113,000 dunams (113 square kilometres) of land in 2022 in an effort to expand illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, a Palestinian research centre said.

29 Dec 2022; MEMO: The head of the Lebanese Forces Party, Samir Geagea, has criticised what he described as an "attempt to impose a president" by the Hezbollah-led camp, by demanding that the president supports and protects the Lebanese "resistance".

"What is happening today is not due to the might of the Axis of Defiance, but rather due to the weakness of those who should have shouldered their responsibilities and are still refusing to do so," Geagea said at a party event.

29 Dec 2022; MEMO: Iran is pressuring the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad to obtain sovereign concessions and agreements in return for contributing to resolving the suffocating economic crisis afflicting the areas under the regime's control, Western diplomats said.

Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted diplomats as saying that Tehran had surprised the Assad regime with draft agreements during preparations for the visit of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

RABAT, Dec 29 (NNN-MAP) — Germany’s state-owned KfW Development Bank and Morocco signed on Tuesday three loan agreements worth 52.6 million euros for water projects.

The agreements were signed by Abderrahim El Hafidi, general director of the state-owned Moroccan Office for Electricity and Drinking Water (ONEE), and Jorg Dux, head of KfW’s water and sanitation department in North Africa.

The loan will increase and strengthen drinking water production, treatment, pumping, and transportation systems in many small and medium-sized towns, the agreement said.

BAGHDAD, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Moqtada al-Sadr, the Muslim Shi'ite cleric who dominated Iraqi politics for two decades, seems isolated for now after his move to step back from formal politics emboldened his Iranian-backed rivals and raised the prospect of fresh factional flare-ups.

Iran, which already controls dozens of heavily-armed Shi'ite militias in its oil-producing neighbour, may now have an opportunity to expand its influence over Iraq's government, a worst case scenario for the United States and its allies.

ANKARA, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan eliminated a retirement age requirement on Wednesday in a move that allows more than 2 million workers to retire immediately, less than six months before an election.

The presidential announcement came during a Wednesday news conference on the popular policy move.

Erdogan's ruling AK Party delivered a hefty hike to the minimum wage last week as part of a campaign to win back support eroded by inflation, a fall in the lira, and a sharp drop in living standards.

ANKARA, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Although Türkiye's soaring inflation is set to drop in 2023, the country's economy is not expected to be out of the woods as growth is now on a downward trend, experts said.

The Turkish economy bounced back strongly from the COVID-19 pandemic to expand by 11.4 percent in 2021, its highest rate in a decade.

The country's annual inflation eased to 84.4 percent in November 2022, from a 24-year high of 85.5 percent the previous month, slowing for the first time in 18 months, official data showed.

ANKARA, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday that the next contact with the Syrian government as part of a road map for dialogue between the two countries will be between the foreign ministers.

The foreign ministers' meeting will be the second stage of the contact after defense ministers of Russia, Türkiye and Syria met in Moscow on Wednesday for normalization between Türkiye and Syria in the decade-long Syrian war, Cavusoglu told reporters at a press briefing in the capital Ankara.

JERUSALEM (AP) — After five elections that have paralyzed Israeli politics for nearly four years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally returned to power with the government he has long coveted: a parliamentary majority of religious and far-right lawmakers who share his hard-line views toward the Palestinians and hostility toward Israel’s legal system.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn into office Thursday, taking the helm of the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history and vowing to enact policies that could cause domestic and regional turmoil and alienate the country’s closest allies.

Netanyahu took the oath of office moments after parliament passed a vote of confidence in his new government. His return marks his sixth term in office, continuing his more than decade-long dominance over Israeli politics.