Middle East & North Africa

08 Apr 2021; MEMO: The funeral of 42-year-old Jerusalemite Osama Siddiq Mansour was held in the occupied village of Biddu village on Tuesday.

Mansour was killed after Israeli occupation forces opened fire at his car in the early hours of Tuesday morning, his wife was injured in the incident. The couple were on their way home.

Osama Mansour, 42, and his wife Sumayya, 35, were on their way home around 2:30am when they were stopped at a flying checkpoint.

TEHRAN, April 7 (Xinhua) -- Iran has increased its uranium enrichment capacity to 16,500 separative work units (SWUs), Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), announced on Wednesday, official Islamic Republic News agency reported.

The AEOI announced that it had plans to boost the capacity of its uranium enrichment to 190,000 SWUs.

SWU is the standard measure of the effort required to separate isotopes of uranium during an enrichment process. One SWU is equivalent to 1 kg of separative work.

TEHRAN, April 7. /TASS/: Iran has vowed that it "will not accept a division of the Trump-era sanctions into JCPOA-related ones and those unrelated to the JCPOA", PressTV reported Wednesday citing its source.

According to an unnamed Iranian senior official, in order to return to the Iran nuke deal, all sanctions imposed during the Trump administration must be annulled, regardless whether they were imposed over the JCPOA or not.

ANKARA, April 7 (NNN-AGENCIES) — European Council President Charles Michel called on Turkey to keep working to resolve disputes with Greece and Cyprus over gas rights in the Mediterranean as he visited Ankara on Tuesday to discuss trade and refugees with President Tayyip Erdogan.

A row between Turkey and EU members Greece and Cyprus over offshore jurisdiction has strained ties, reaching a peak last summer when Turkish and Greek navy frigates escorted vessels exploring for hydrocarbons in disputed waters.

TRIPOLI, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Libya's Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah on Tuesday met with his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis in the Libyan capital Tripoli to discuss restoring the bilateral relations.

"We hope to restore the distinguished relations between the two countries back to their previous state based on common interests, as we have friendly relations with Greece and there is a historic, political, cultural, economic and also humanitarian dimension to the relationship between the two countries," Dbeibah told a joint press conference following the meeting.

CAIRO, April 7 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi stressed on Wednesday that "all choices are open" in dealing with the disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

"Don't touch a drop of Egypt's water," Sisi said during the inauguration of an integrated complex for secure and smart documents in Cairo.

He stressed all choices are open, but cooperation is better to reach a binding deal with Ethiopia on the filling and operation of the GERD.

TUNIS, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Tunisia and China signed on Tuesday an economic and technical cooperation agreement at the headquarters of the Tunisian Foreign Ministry in Tunis, capital of Tunisia.

The cooperation agreement, signed by Chinese Ambassador to Tunisia Zhang Jianguo and Tunisian Minister of Foreign Affairs Othman Jerandi, "shows, once again, the sincerity and the quality of the friendship between our two peoples and countries," said Zhang.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An Iranian ship believed to be a base for the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and anchored for years in the Red Sea off Yemen has been attacked, Tehran acknowledged Wednesday.

06 Apr 2021; MEMO: The Iranian authorities have arrested an Israeli spy and several other people with contacts with foreign intelligence services in the eastern province of Azerbaijan, Iranian Fars NewsAgency reported.

The agency quoted an Intelligence Ministry official as saying that "an Israeli spy has been arrested in Iran's Eastern Azerbaijan province … also other spies who were in contact with several countries' intelligence services have been arrested as well."

07 Apr 2021; MEMO: Saudi Arabia reportedly owes billions of dollars to some of the largest construction companies in the world in unpaid bills for work completed on the Riyadh metro project, which is key to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plan to modernise the Kingdom.