Middle East & North Africa

CAIRO, Apr 8 (NNN-MENA) – The COVID-19 pandemic claimed nearly 4,000 lives out of the over 60,000 infected cases in Iran, while more states in the Middle East started to require wearing face masks to curb the spread of the pandemic.

The death toll of the virus in Iran rose by 133 to 3,872 on Tuesday, Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education said, adding, the confirmed cases went up by 2,089 to 62,589.

Also, the number of recovered cases hit 27,039, while 3,987 others are in critical condition.

TEHRAN, April 8 (Xinhua) -- An Iranian vice president said the United States cannot block Iran's request for a 5 billion U.S. dollars' loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for fighting the novel coronavirus, state TV reported Wednesday.

Mohammad Nahavandian, Iran's vice president for economic affairs, said that "no country in the IMF has the right to veto" the loan requests.

"The IMF policy should be fair in assessing and approving loan requests" for its members, Nahavandian was quoted as saying.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — At the construction site in Tel Aviv, Jamal Salman and the other Palestinian workers wore gloves and masks, and their employer provided apartments for them to stay overnight.

But his wife, alarmed by the news about the coronavirus outbreak in Israel, called him every night from the West Bank, begging him to come home. He came back early this week.

07 April 2020; MEMO: The pro-Houthi Yemeni army yesterday recaptured the strategic Al-Khanjar camp in the northern Al-Jawf province, along the Saudi-Yemeni border.

07 April 2020; MEMO: Investment bonds issued by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Aramco, recorded an 8.2 per cent fall in value last month, the worst monthly performance ever after crude oil prices also fell by more than 50 per cent since the beginning of this year, Bloomberg has reported.

The news agency said that the oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia has not served Aramco’s bondholders well.

07 April 2020; MEMO: An officer in the US army and two fighters from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been killed in an ambush in Syria’s eastern province of Deir Ez-Zor.

The gunmen are reported to have been from the Daesh.

The ambush took place in the town of Al-Sur, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) tweeted yesterday.

07 April 2020; MEMO: Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi today called on the world’s nations not to abide by the sanctions imposed on his country by the United States.

07 April 2020; MEMO: Egyptian authorities have refused to receive a Qatar-chartered Spanish airplane transporting stranded Egyptians from Doha, a source at the Qatari Foreign Ministry said today.

The source told Al Jazeera that the Qatari authorities had hired a Spanish plane on Friday, adding that Egyptian authorities had refused “to receive the carrier before take off, claiming that all the international air traffic at Cairo airport had stopped as a precautionary measure to fight the coronavirus.”

07 April 2020; MEMO: Israeli settlers have been accused of trying to spread the coronavirus in Palestinian neighbourhoods by spitting on cars in a West Bank village.

MOSCOW, Apr 7 (NNN-TASS) – Russia and Saudi Arabia are “very close” to a deal on oil production cuts, Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund managing 10 billion U.S. dollars, said, Monday.

“I think the whole market understands that, this deal is important and it will bring lots of stability, so much important stability to the market, and we are very close,” Dmitriev said, in an online interview with CNBC.