Middle East & North Africa

26 Nov 2021; MEMO: Israeli occupation authorities appear to have stalled plans to build 9,000 settlement units on the site of the deserted Qalandia Airport in the occupied West Bank, according to a rights group.

Peace Now activist, Hagit Ofran, said a district planning committee meeting at which the project was expected to be approved has been cancelled, meaning "the plan is off the table for now."

This comes after a local committee had voted in support of it on Wednesday.

26 Nov 2021; MEMO: The Sudanese Congress Party, on Friday, said political detainees in the country have staged an open-ended hunger strike to protest their detention since 25 October and the "denial of their legal rights", Anadolu News Agency reports.

"The political detainees who are being held in the cells of the security apparatus near the Shendi station in the capital, Khartoum, staged an open hunger strike starting today, Friday," the party said in a statement, without referring to their numbers.

26 Nov 2021; MEMO: Palestinians in Israeli occupied West Bank favour one bi-national state over a two-state solution, a new opinion poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre (JMCC) shows. Support for the international status quo is losing ground, in favour of a solution based on equal rights for the 12 million people in historic Palestine, found the survey conducted in cooperation with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), a foundation associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

26 Nov 2021; MEMO: Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz's to Morocco, and the signing of military agreements "targets Algeria", local media outlets reported Speaker of the Algerian Council of the Nation (Upper House), Saleh Goudjil, said yesterday.

ADDIS ABABA, Nov 26 (NNN-AGENCES) — United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for an immediate end to the fighting in Ethiopia, as the United States warned there was “no military solution” to the African nation’s civil war.

The calls came as Ethiopian media reported that Abiy Ahmed, the country’s prime minister, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was at the front “giving leadership from the battlefield” amid an escalating year-long crisis.

TUNIS, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Police in the Tunisian capital shot and wounded a man who tried to storm the Interior Ministry on Friday, local media and witnesses said.

Local Mosaique FM radio said police shot the man in the leg and brought him under control. He was taken to hospital, the radio said.

Witnesses said they saw police running after the man before shooting him.

"I am at the crime scene and I cannot give any details now," a ministry spokesman told Reuters.

TRIPOLI, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Friday strongly condemned any form of electoral-related violence after it was alarmed by an attack on a court in Libyan southern city of Sebha.

BEIRUT (AP) — A small group of protesters broke into a ministry building in Beirut early on Friday and removed a photo of the president from one of its main rooms, as the Lebanese pound hit a new low amid a worsening economic and political stalemate.

The protesters who entered the Ministry of Social Affairs said conditions in crisis-hit Lebanon have become unbearable as a result of the rapid economic collapse and ongoing crash of the pound, which reached 25,100 to the dollar. The previous record was 25,000.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Friday that Israel is “on the threshold of an emergency situation” after authorities detected the country’s first case of a new coronavirus variant and barred travel to and from most African countries.

The Health Ministry said it detected the new strain in a traveler who had returned from Malawi and was investigating two other suspected cases. The three individuals, who had all been vaccinated, were placed in isolation.

26 Nov 2021; MEMO: Turkey, on Thursday, rescued 37 asylum seekers who were illegally pushed back by Greece to Turkish waters in the Aegean Sea, Anadolu News Agency reports.

The asylum seekers, who were in a rubber boat and two life rafts, were brought ashore near the Bodrum district of the Aegean Mugla province, said security sources, who asked not to be named due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

All of them were later taken to the provincial migration office.