Middle East & North Africa

RAMALLAH, Sept 28 (NNN-WAFA) – The loss in the tourism sector in Palestine has exceeded one billion U.S. dollars, since the outbreak of COVID-19 in its territories, an official report published yesterday said, on the occasion of World Tourism Day.

The report, jointly published by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the ministry of tourism and antiquities, added that, the performance of the tourism sector in Palestine, keeps deteriorating due to the COVID-19, especially in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

ANKARA, Sept 28 (Reuters) - The presidents of Russia and Turkey will hold talks on Wednesday on curbing renewed violence in northwest Syria and possibly expanding Moscow's sales of military defence systems to Ankara, Turkish officials said.

Vladimir Putin is hosting Tayyip Erdogan at Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi, where the Turkish leader will press for a return to a ceasefire they agreed last year to end a Russian and Syrian army assault on Turkey-backed fighters in Syria's Idlib region.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi yesterday inaugurated the world's largest wastewater treatment plant.

The Egyptian presidency said in a statement that 20 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.14 billion) were spent on building and preparing the facility, adding that it has a production capacity of 5.6 million cubic metres a day.

Water from the Bahr Al-Baqar plant will be transferred to North Sinai and used to irrigate 476,000 feddans (494 acres) of land.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: The year 2020 was the worst for the Palestinian Authority (PA) since its establishment in 1994 due to the Israeli occupation and the coronavirus pandemic, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said yesterday.

UNCTAD said in its annual report that the PA's economic decline in 2020 was a continuation of its already bad economic conditions in 2019.

It blamed the COVID-19 and measures taken by the Israeli occupation for the economic downturn across the occupied Palestinian territories.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: The Palestinian Authority security services arrested on Monday the key witness in the Nizar Banat murder case, local sources have revealed. Banat, a harsh critic of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, was killed by PA security officers in June.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: Israel does not have conventional military capabilities that enable it to strike and permanently eliminate the Iranian nuclear project, as it did in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an opinion piece published in Haaretz's Hebrew site.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: The Jordanian government has agreed to resume flights to the Syrian capital Damascus as of 3 October after a 10-year hiatus as a result of the Syrian civil war.

Jordan's Interior Minister Mazen Al-Faraya also announced the reopening of the Jordanian-Syrian border from tomorrow morning to allow for the movement of freight and travellers.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: Egyptian security forces have arrested an Egyptian media professor, Ayman Mansour Nada, who criticised media figures close to the regime.

In a series of articles circulated on social media, Nada said that the opposition media abroad had reached a wider audience among Egyptians than the media within Egypt.

In his article, Nada accused official agencies of exerting control over the media.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the passing of a motion at the UK Labour Party conference on Monday that recognised Israel as an "apartheid" state and called for sanctions against it, as well as the immediate recognition of Palestine, Wafa news agency has reported.

28 Sep 2021; MEMO: Egypt has said it will tax social media content creators earning more than 500,000 Egyptian pounds ($32,000) annually.

"Anyone who makes a profit in Egypt must be fairly taxed whatever their field of work is," said tax authority official Mohamed Al-Gayyer.

Another tax official, Mohamed Keshk, said that anyone who fails to comply faces jail time of up to five years for tax evasion.