Middle East & North Africa

28 July 2021; MEMO: Libyan militia leader, Al-Kani, accused of major human rights violations and sanctioned by the United States, was shot dead in Libya's eastern Benghazi province yesterday, AP reported officials saying.

According to AP, the officials said Al-Kani was killed along with one of his associates during an exchange of gunfire.

The Libyan Al-Mashhad news website quoted local sources as saying that Al-Kani was "killed in a farm where he resides in Benghazi".

28 July 2021; MEMO: Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is expected to postpone the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, a source close to him told an Israeli newspaper on Tuesday, citing Bennett's fear of international uproar.

On Monday, the Israeli Supreme Court is scheduled to hold a hearing session to decide whether to evict four Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah.

TEHRAN, July 28 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Demonstrators gathered in the Iranian capital, Tehran, in response to renewed power outages, local media reported.

Power cuts in recent weeks have temporarily paralyzed many business centers across the country, and on Monday it happened at the Alaeddin Passage, where electronic devices are mainly sold.

According to the Isna news agency, the situation has calmed meanwhile.

The Fars news agency published a video of the demonstration on Twitter that shows protesters chanting slogans critical of the government.

RAQQA (Syria), July 28 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Four years after the battle for the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, children and families are still living in damaged homes with severely limited access to clean water, electricity, and education, a report by Save the Children has found.

Raqqa, once the self-styled “capital” of the ISIL (ISIS) group in Syria, was subjected in 2017 to a heavy air and ground offensive by the US-led coalition to defeat the group and gain control of the city.

JERUSALEM, July 28 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Israeli forces and Palestinian militant groups carried out attacks during May’s Gaza conflict that apparently amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch says.

An investigation by the campaign group into what it says were three Israeli strikes that killed 62 civilians found no evidence of military targets nearby.

The Israeli military says it only struck military targets in Gaza.

The report also says the 4,300 rockets militants fired at Israel constituted indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

DUBAI, July 28 (Reuters) - Iran's supreme leader on Wednesday declared Tehran would not accept Washington's "stubborn" demands in talks to revive a 2015 nuclear deal and said the United States had failed to guarantee that it would never abandon the pact again.

"The Americans acted completely cowardly and maliciously," state TV quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying.

"They once violated the nuclear deal at no cost by exiting it. Now they explicitly say that they cannot give guarantees that it would not happen again."

BEIRUT, July 27 (Xinhua) -- The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development (KFAED) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) signed on Tuesday an agreement to expand support for the solid waste management in Lebanon, the National News Agency reported.

According to the agreement, the KFAED will provide 2.5 million U.S. dollars to support the UNDP in Lebanon in addressing this country's mounting waste management challenges.

BAGHDAD, July 28 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi National Dialogue Front announced on Wednesday its withdrawal from the parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 10.

It is the third political group, after Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's bloc and the Iraqi Communist Party, that has decided to withdraw from the upcoming Iraqi elections.

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — A Turkish-born American believed to be behind a secret messaging application that has been linked to Turkey’s failed 2016 military coup arrived in Istanbul last month where he turned himself in to authorities, the state-run news agency reported Wednesday.

Anadolu Agency said David Keynes, the alleged license holder for the ByLock messaging app who was wanted in Turkey, was taken into police custody at Istanbul’s main airport on June 9.

Riyadh; 27 July 2021 (UMMN): Saudi Arabia is to ban travel to ‘Red List’ countries In an efforts to curb the spread of coronavirus and its new variants, state news agency SPA said on Tuesday.

"The Ministry of Interior stresses that citizens are still banned from travelling directly or via another country to these states or any other that has yet to control the pandemic or where the new strains have spread," the official said.