Middle East & North Africa

 Kanpur: A house was gutted in a cylinder explosion on Wednesday afternoon.

The sound was so loud that it was heard far and the villagers were horrified.

A villager was also hit in the accident. He has suffered burns.

The fire broke out at Majra Kapoor Farm of Katri Domanpur in Maharajpur in the afternoon due to the leakage of a gas cylinder in Nanku's kutcha house.

The whole of the house started burning with smoke. The fire got terrifying.

GAZA, Aug 16 (NNN-WAFA) – Israel claims that it has discovered a tunnel underneath the border between the regime and the Gaza Strip, which Hamas has dismissed as nothing more than an attempt by the Israelis to cover up their “crimes.”

“The occupation (regime) is marketing fake achievements and victories, to the Israeli society, to use it in its electoral bazaar,” said Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, in a statement, yesterday.

DAMASCUS/BEIRUT, Aug 16 (NNN-SANA/NNA) – Syrian and Lebanese officials, met in the Syrian capital, Damascus yesterday, to discuss ways to facilitate the monthly return of 15,000 Syrian refugees.

Syrian Minister of Local Administration and Environment, Hussein Makhlouf, held a meeting with visiting Lebanese Minister of the Displaced, Issam Charafeddine, during which they touched upon measures taken by Syria, to secure a safe and quick home return for the refugees, based on a timeline set by both countries.

DAMASCUS, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- Eleven people were killed on Tuesday by a Turkish airstrike targeting a military position in northern Syria, reported the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Turkish strike hit the Syrian military base in the countryside of Ayn al-Arab city in the northern countryside of Aleppo province near the Syrian-Turkish border, said the UK-based watchdog group.

Eight people were also wounded in the strike, and the death toll could rise due to the number of critically wounded people, it said.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran said Tuesday it submitted a “written response” to what has been described as a final roadmap to restore its tattered nuclear deal with world powers.

Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency offered no details on the substance of its response, but suggested that Tehran still wouldn’t take the European Union-mediated proposal, despite warnings there would be no more negotiations.

15 August 2022; MEMO: Israel has cancelled a Summit to mark the two-year anniversary of a peace treaty signed with Arab countries, local Israeli media reports.

According to the report, diplomats from several Arab countries declined to participate in a Summit in Israel to mark the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords.

15 August 2022; MEMO: Saudi Arabia's investment firm, Kingdom Holding Co, invested over $500 million into three major Russian energy companies as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the firm's filings have shown.

According to Kingdom Holding Co's recently-released regulatory filings, the firm invested heavily in the three major Russian energy companies Gazprom, Rosneft, and Lukoil between February and March.

16 August 2022; MEMO: Tunisia's trade deficit has increased by 57.1 per cent on an annual basis in the first seven months of this year, Anadolu has reported. The increase comes amid a sharp rise in import costs due to inflation and the rising prices of basic commodities.

According to the Tunisian National Institute of Statistics, the trade deficit — the difference between exports and imports — amounted to 13.70 billion dinars ($4.3bn) compared with 8.72bn dinars ($2.78bn) recorded during the same period last year.

16 August 2022; MEMO: An Israeli soldier has been killed by so-called "friendly fire" near the apartheid "separation" wall in Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank. Natan Fitoussi was at first said by the occupation army to have been the victim of Palestinian "gunmen", but the army retracted its account of his death and said that one of his colleagues had shot and killed him in error.

16 August 2022; MEMO: Israel admitted responsibility for killing five  Palestinian children in an air strike on the Fallujah cemetery in the town of Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 7 August, after it had initially claimed they were killed as a result of a missile fired by Islamic Jihad.