Middle East & North Africa

TRIPOLI, Aug 24 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Twenty-two bodies of illegal migrants were retrieved by the Libyan Red Crescent, in the coastal city of Zwara, chief of mission for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Libya said, yesterday.

“These painful deaths are the result of the increasingly hardening policy towards people fleeing conflict and extreme poverty, and a failure to humanely manage migration flows,” Federico Soda tweeted.

CAIRO, Aug 24 (NNN-MENA) – Egyptian and French foreign ministers discussed, on Sunday, regional crises, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as, the latest developments in war-torn Libya and blast-stricken Lebanon, said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, in a statement.

Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, and his French counterpart, Jean-Yves Le Drian, stressed the necessity of preserving the principle of the two-state solution, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

24 Aug 2020; MEMO: Israel has sold spyware to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain helping them monitor the activities of dissidents, Haaretz reported yesterday.

24 Aug 2020; MEMO: Sudan’s Ba’ath and Popular Congress parties have rejected any attempt to normalise ties with Israel, considering it an occupation power in Palestine, Quds Press reported yesterday.

Both parties said in a joint statement issued on Saturday that “Israel is an occupation state that occupies beloved Palestine.”

They stressed that “it is impossible and it is not right to normalise relations with the Israeli occupation state.”

24 Aug 2020; MEMO: Moroccan Prime Minister Saad Dine El Otmani on Sunday rejected any normalisation of relations with Israel, Reuters reports.

“We refuse any normalisation with the Zionist entity because this emboldens it to go further in breaching the rights of the Palestinian people,” El Otmani told his Islamist PJD party.

24 Aug 2020; MEMO: Israel has been coordinating with Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia to demonise Turkey, which Israel’s Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen believes a “bigger threat”.

Roger Boyes wrote for the Sunday Times that Cohen discussed the Turkish threat with intelligence officials from Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia about two years ago.

24 Aug 2020; MEMO: The United Arab Emirates sent four F-16 fighter jets to take part in military training exercises with the Greece on the island of Crete, the Athens-based daily newspaper Kathimerini reported on Friday.

According to paper, the aircraft will join in the training exercise with Greece’s military over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heightened tensions with Turkey.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday the United States would continue to ensure Israel enjoyed a military edge in the Middle East under any future U.S. arms deals with the United Arab Emirates.

“The United States has a legal requirement with respect to qualitative military edge. We will continue to honour that,” Pompeo told reporters after a meeting in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A U.S.-brokered deal on normalising relations between Israel and the UAE was announced on Aug. 13.

BEIRUT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Pierre Ashkar, president of the Syndicate of Hotels Owners in Lebanon, announced on Monday that 2,060 restaurants and 163 hotels were severely damaged by Beirut port's explosions, Elnashra news website reported.

Ashkar noted that the cost of fixing the hotels damage ranges between 100,000 U.S. dollars and 14 million U.S. dollars per hotel while adding that it is hard to assess the indirect losses caused by the full or partial closure of hotels.

ISTANBUL, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said that Turkey has achieved solid progress in its defense industry and is able to meet its national defense and security needs.

"The distance we have covered in the defense industry has recently contributed to the achievement of many strategic successes both within and outside our borders," Erdogan said at the delivery ceremony of new naval systems in Istanbul.