Middle East & North Africa

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - El Al Airlines on Monday will fly Israel’s first flight to the United Arab Emirates by a commercial carrier, a timetable on the Israel Airports Authority’s website showed, as the countries forge ahead with a deal to normalise ties.

The direct flight between Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport and the UAE’s political capital of Abu Dhabi is expected to carry an Israeli delegation and accompanying officials from the United States, which brokered the Aug. 13 accord. [nL8N2FR6C6]

DUBAI (Reuters) - The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen said it intercepted and destroyed on Friday an explosives-laden drone launched by the Iran-aligned group in the direction of Saudi Arabia, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian authorities said on Friday they had arrested the acting leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mahmoud Ezzat, during a raid on an apartment in Cairo.

The arrest is the latest blow to Egypt’s oldest and most organised Islamist movement, which has been crushed in a sweeping crackdown since it was forced from power seven years ago.

Ezzat was an influential former deputy to Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie, and was seen as a hardliner within the group. He became acting leader after Badie’s arrest in August 2013.

BEIRUT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), announced on Thursday that the UNESCO has launched the initiative "Beirut" to attract funds to be used in rehabilitating Beirut's heritage buildings, LBCI local TV channel reported.

"We should implement measures to preserve the national heritage of Lebanon and we will be holding a meeting for donors' country by the end of September for this purpose," Azoulay said during her meeting with Caretaker Culture Minister Abbas Mortada.

NICOSIA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission (EC) signed its first deal to buy COVID-19 vaccines from pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides said on Thursday.

She told state television after signing the agreement at the EC premises in Nicosia with AstraZeneca that the deal makes it possible for EU countries to purchase up to 300 million vaccines.

BEIRUT, Aug 27 (NNN-XINHUA) — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Director-General Audrey Azoulay said on Thursday that 159 private and public schools as well as 85,000 students were affected by Beirut’s explosions, Xinhua news agency reported.

“We need approximately US$22 million to rehabilitate destroyed walls in these schools,” Azoulay said during her tour at the Port of Beirut after her visit to schools in Achrafieh, an area heavily affected by the explosions, al-Jadeed TV channel reported.

27 Aug 2020; MEMO: Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Tuesday warned Greece against making further escalations in the Eastern Mediterranean region.

“If you take wrong steps, we don’t want to say we will make a mistake, but we will do what is necessary without hesitation,” the Turkish minister said during a joint press conference with his German counterpart Heiko Maas in Ankara.

27 Aug 2020; MEMO: Israeli occupation forces yesterday arrested two Palestinian MPs from the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas’ parliamentarian bloc in occupied West Bank, Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) reported.

According to eyewitnesses, the PPS said that the Israeli occupation forces raided the West Bank city of Ramallah and used live, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the Palestinians who had come out against the Israeli assault.

27 Aug 2020; MEMO: An Egyptian court sentenced a man to 15 years in jail after he claimed that he received revelation from God and attempted to make changes to the Muslim holy book, the Quran.

The Port Said Criminal Court convicted Nakkash, 40, after he was arrested and confronted with the accusations made against him.

He was charged with violating the law regulating the printing of copies of the Quran.

27 Aug 2020; MEMO: The Supreme Judicial Council of Kuwait has suspended seven judges and referred them for investigation over their potential association to a money laundering network run by the Iranian citizen, Fuad Salehi.

Al-Qabas newspaper quoted an informed source as saying that five out of the seven judges work in the court of first instance while two judges work in the court of appeals, noting that the investigations did not reveal any mobile messages between them and Salehi.