Middle East & North Africa

05 June 2021; MEMO: Israel's security cabinet on Friday approved a plan to reinforce numbers of Border Police in mixed Arab-Jewish cities for the coming three months, Israeli media reported.

Israeli Public Security Minister Amir Ohana introduced the plan in the wake of protests waged by Arab citizens against the Israeli offensive on Gaza between 11 and 21 May, when Israel killed around 265 Palestinians, including 67 children and 40 women.

06 June 2021; MEMO: Iraqi military said on Sunday that air defences at Iraq's Ain al-Asad airbase that hosts US Forces, intercepted and shot down two drones, reports Reuters.

The military said in a statement the drones were intercepted and shot down at around 12:30 am local time.

On May 8, an attack by an unmanned aerial surveillance system targeted Iraq's Ain al-Asad airbase, but it caused no injuries.

06 June 2021; MEMO: At least 12 people were killed on Saturday in an explosion near a petrol station in the Yemeni city of Marib which members of the Saudi-backed government blamed on a missile strike by Houthi forces, reports Reuters.

A medical source told Reuters dozens of people, many of them badly burned, had been taken to Marib General Hospital and 12 of them had died of their injuries, including five children.

06 June 2021; MEMO: The head of Israel's domestic security service issued a rare warning on Saturday of possible violence during one of the most politically charged periods in decades, with the country on the verge of unseating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its longest-serving leader, reports Reuters.

06 June 2021; MEMO: Al Jazeera News Channel's journalist Givara Budeiri was arrested in a brutal manner by Israeli occupation forces while covering demonstrations in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government responsible for her welfare and demands her immediate release.

ADDIS ABABA, June 5 (Xinhua) -- The African Union (AU) has already deployed its long-term observers for Ethiopia's general elections scheduled to take place on June 21.

Following an invitation from Ethiopia, the Chairperson of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, has approved the deployment of both long- and short-term AU observers to the general elections in the Eastern African country, according to a statement from the pan-African bloc on Saturday.

BEIRUT, June 6 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed and several others were injured on Sunday in clashes among Palestinian factions in the Rashidieh camp in southern Lebanon, Elnashra news website reported.

Violent clashes started in the early morning hours after members of Fatah movement raided the house of a Palestinian national wanted over drug trafficking, the report said.

It added that a number of people were besieged in their houses in the vicinity of the ongoing clashes inside the camp.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli border police forcefully detained a veteran correspondent for the Al Jazeera satellite channel while she was reporting from an embattled Jerusalem neighborhood where dozens of Palestinian families are slated for eviction by Jewish settlers.

Givara Budeiri was released late Saturday, several hours after border police detained her in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where she had been wearing body armor marked “press.” Al Jazeera said police also destroyed equipment belonging to a cameraman for the channel.

RABAT, Jun 5 (NNN-MAP) – Moroccan Foreign Minister, Nasser Bourita, met yesterday, with two visiting Libyan rivalling speakers, as “part of Morocco’s mediation efforts, to contribute to the settlement of the Libyan crisis,” said a ministry statement.

Aguila Saleh Issa, speaker of the Libyan House of Representatives, and Khaled al-Michiri, president of the Libyan High Council of State, arrived in Morocco on Thursday. It wasn’t clear whether Saleh Issa and al-Michiri had held direct talks in Morocco.

ADDIS ABABA, Jun 5 (NNN-ENA) – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), yesterday warned, swarms of desert locusts are expected to descend on parts of Ethiopia and Somalia.

“Despite an earlier decline, the current upsurge prevails in the Horn of Africa, where good rains allowed breeding to continue with hatching and more hopper bands forming in eastern Ethiopia and northern Somalia,” said the latest FAO report.