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NABLUS, West Bank: Israeli forces killed three Palestinians, including two militants, in the occupied West Bank Friday, days after Israel concluded a major two-day offensive meant to crack down on militants.
The persistent violence raised questions about the effectiveness of the raid earlier this week in the Jenin refugee camp, which saw Israel launch rare airstrikes on militant targets, deploy hundreds of troops and cause widespread damage to roads, homes and businesses. Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed in the operation.
In the nearby city of Nablus, the West Bank’s commercial capital and a flashpoint city, two militants were killed in a gunbattle with Israeli forces. Israel’s Shin Bet security agency said the men were behind a shooting attack this week on a police vehicle.
Later Friday, Palestinian health officials said a man was fatally shot in the chest by Israeli forces during a demonstration in Umm Safa, a town in the central West Bank. The army had no immediate comment.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the two dead in Nablus as Khayri Mohammed Sari Shaheen, 34, and Hamza Moayed Mohammed Maqbool, 32. Two militant groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, claimed them as members.
In the aftermath of the shootout, bullet casings littered the blood-stained ground. Palestinians carried the bodies of the men killed into the hospital, chanting “God is great!” as guns fired into the air.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised Friday’s operation and said Israel would continue to act to root out militants.
“There will be no loop that isn’t closed and there won’t be a terrorist who doesn’t pay the heaviest price,” he said.
Friday’s deaths are part of a year-long spiral violence that shows no signs of abating, despite the fierce Israeli operation this week in the Jenin refugee camp. They follow a shooting on Thursday by a Hamas militant near an Israeli West Bank settlement that killed an Israeli soldier.
Monday’s raid in the Jenin refugee camp bore the hallmarks of the second Palestinian uprising, a period of intense violence in the early 2000s that killed thousands. But the current round of fighting remains different from that one, mainly because it is more limited in scope, with Israeli military operations focused on several strongholds of Palestinian militants.
Israel has been staging raids in the West Bank for 16 months, expanding its activities in early 2022 in response to a spate of Palestinian attacks. The northern West Bank, which includes Nablus and Jenin and where the Palestinian Authority has less of a foothold, has been a major friction point.
Over 150 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, and Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis have killed at least 27 people.
Israel says most of the Palestinians killed have been militants. But stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.
Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.
TEHRAN: Four militants attacked a police station and killed two security forces in southeastern Iran, state TV reported on Saturday.
The armed group attacked a police station in Zahedan, a city in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province, about 30 kilometers from the border with Pakistan, triggering a shootout. Two security forces were killed, the report said.
Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said in a statement that the four militants were killed.
The report quoted Alireza Marhamati, the province’s deputy governor, as saying the militants were trying to gain access to the police station and were equipped with grenades, but did not elaborate further.
State-run IRNA news agency also reported that authorities on Saturday hanged two men involved in the October 26 deadly attack on Shah Cheragh mosque in the city of Shiraz, the second holiest site in Iran.
The report said the two were members of the extremist Daesh group and were behind the deadly attack that killed at least 13 and wounded 30 people.
Semi-official ISNA and Tasnim news agencies said that the two were publicly executed in the city of Shiraz.
The gunmen who executed the attack, identified as Sobhan Komrouni, died in a hospital in southern Iran, days after the Oct. 26 attack, from injuries sustained during his arrest.
State TV at the time blamed the attack on “takfiris,” a term that refers to Sunni Muslim extremists who have targeted the country’s Shiite majority in the past.
The attack came as protesters elsewhere in Iran marked a symbolic 40 days since a woman’s death in custody ignited the biggest anti-government movement in over a decade. It appeared to be unrelated to the demonstrations.
TEHRAN: Iran hanged two men in public on Saturday over an October attack on a shrine in the southern city of Shiraz that claimed over a dozen lives, the judiciary said.
The October 26 attack on the highly revered Shiite Muslim shrine of Shah Cheragh, which left 13 people dead and 30 wounded, was claimed by the Sunni Muslim extremist Daesh group.
“The death sentences of two of the perpetrators of the Shah Cheragh terrorist attack were carried out in public this morning,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website said.
The pair were hanged at dawn on a street near the shrine in Shiraz, the capital of Fars province, the official news agency IRNA reported.
They were identified as Mohammad Ramez Rashidi and Naeem Hashem Qatali, Mizan said, without elaborating.
In March, an Iranian court had sentenced the two men to death after they were convicted of “corruption on earth, armed rebellion and acting against national security.”
They were also charged with membership of Daesh and “conspiracy against the security of the country.”
At the time, Fars chief justice Kazem Moussavi said they were directly involved in the “arming, procurement, logistics and guidance” of the main perpetrator.
Three other defendants in the case were sentenced to prison for five, 15 and 25 years for being members of Daesh, he said.
One of the attackers, identified by media in Iran as Hamed Badakhshan, died of injuries sustained during his arrest, the authorities said.
In November, the Islamic republic said 26 “takfiri terrorists” from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan had been arrested in connection with the attack.
In Shiite-dominated Iran, the term takfiri generally refers to militants or proponents of radical Sunni Islam.
The shrine attack came more than a month after protests erupted across Iran over the death in custody of a young Iranian Kurdish woman.
Mahsa Amini, 22, died after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran for allegedly violating the country’s dress code for women.
Daesh claimed its first attack in Iran in 2017 when armed men and suicide bombers attacked the seat of parliament in Tehran and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic, killing 17 people and wounding dozens.
Public executions are relatively rare in Iran with almost all hangings carried out inside prisons.
Iran executes more people annually than any nation other than China, according to rights groups including the London-based Amnesty International.
ISTANBUL: Turkiye’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that he was pressing Russia to extend a Black Sea grain deal by at least three months and announced a visit by President Vladimir Putin in August.
He was speaking at a joint news conference with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky after the two parties met to discuss
the fate of an arrangement
, brokered last year by Turkiye and the United Nations, to allow for the safe export of grain from Ukrainian ports via the Black Sea despite the war.
Zelensky’s visit followed stops in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, part of a tour of some NATO capitals aimed at encouraging them to take concrete steps at a summit next week toward granting Kyiv membership of the alliance, which Erdogan said Ukraine deserved.
Erdogan said work was under way on extending the Black Sea grain deal beyond its expiration date of July 17 and for longer periods beyond that. The deal would be one of the most important issues on the agenda for his meeting with Putin in Turkiye next month, he said.
“Our hope is that it will be extended at least once every three months, not every two months. We will make an effort in this regard and try to increase the duration of it to two years,” he said at the news conference with Zelensky.
Both men said they had also discussed another key question for Erdogan’s talks with Putin — the question of prisoner exchanges, which Zelensky said had been the first thing on their agenda. “I hope we will get a result from this soon,” Erdogan said.
Zelensky said he would wait for a result to comment but made clear the discussion had gone into specifics on returning all captives including children deported to Russia and other groups.
“We are working on the return of our captives, political prisoners, Crimean Tatars,” he said, referring to members of Ukraine’s Muslim community in the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. “Our partners have all the lists. We are really working on this.”
Erdogan said the issue could also come up in his contacts with the Russian leader before his visit. “If we make some phone calls before that, we will discuss it on the call as well,” he said.
The Kremlin said it would be watching the talks closely, saying Putin has highly appreciated the mediation of Erdogan in attempting to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.
“As for forthcoming contacts between Putin and Erdogan, we do not rule them out in the foreseeable future,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters ahead of the Istanbul talks with Zelensky, which began on Friday.
Russia, angry about aspects of the grain deal’s implementation, has threatened not to allow its further extension beyond July 17.
Turkiye, a NATO member, has managed to retain cordial relations with both Russia and Ukraine over the past 16 months of the war and last year it helped to broker prisoner exchanges.
Turkiye has not joined its Western allies in imposing economic sanctions on Russia, but has also supplied arms to Ukraine and called for its sovereignty to be respected.
BAGHDAD: Iraq opened an investigation into the case of a dual Israeli-Russian academic who has been missing in Iraq since March, a government spokesman said on Friday.
Bassem Al-Awadi’s comments were the first official Iraqi statements since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday that Elizabeth Tsurkov is still alive “and we hold Iraq responsible for her safety and well-being.”
Netanyahu said Tsurkov is being held by the Shiite group Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, a powerful Iran-backed group that the US government listed as a terrorist organization in 2009.
Tsurkov, whose work focuses on the Middle East, and specifically war-torn Syria, is an expert on regional affairs and has been widely quoted over the years by international media. Tsurkov last tweeted on March 21.
Tsurkov could not have used her Israeli passport to enter Iraq as the two countries do not have diplomatic relations.
Tsurkov, who is pursuing a doctorate at Princeton University, is a fellow at the Washington-based think tank New Lines Institute.
“Due to the ongoing official investigations into the disappearance of a foreign journalist, there is no official statement yet,” Al-Awadi said in a text message. “We are unable to provide specific details at this time.”
Netanyahu said Tsurkov is an academic who visited Iraq on her Russian passport, “at her own initiative pursuant to work on her doctorate and academic research on behalf of Princeton University.”
Tsurkov could not have used her Israeli passport to enter Iraq as the two countries do not have diplomatic relations.
A senior official from Kataeb Hezbollah would not comment on the matter.
The group later issued a statement in which they did not confirm nor deny their role in Tsurkov’s disappearance but called for identification and prosecution of Iraqis involved in facilitating the work of Israeli citizens in a country that prohibits engagement with Israel.
Iran emerged as a major power broker in Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, supporting Shiite groups and militias that have enjoyed wide influence in the country ever since.
Days after her disappearance, a local website reported that Iraqi authorities had detained an Iranian citizen involved in her kidnapping.
It said Tsurkov was kidnapped from Baghdad’s central neighborhood of Karradah and that Iran’s Embassy in the Iraqi capital was pressing for the man’s release and to have him deported to Iran.
Some Iraqi activists posted a copy of a passport of an Iranian man at the time, claiming that he was involved in the kidnapping.
Israel considers Iran to be its greatest enemy, citing the country’s hostile rhetoric, support for militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and its suspected nuclear program.
NEW YORK: The US and its Western allies clashed with Russia and Iran at the UN Security Council over Tehran’s advancing uranium enrichment and its reported supply of combat drones to Moscow being used to attack Ukraine.
The sharp exchanges came at the council’s semiannual meeting on implementation of its resolution endorsing the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major countries known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which the US under then-President Donald Trump left in 2018.
At the start of the meeting, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused Britain, which hold the council presidency, of seeking to hold “an openly politicized show” by inviting Ukraine to take part in the meeting when it is not part of the JCPOA. He demanded a procedural vote on its participation.
US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood countered, accusing both Iran and Russia of participating in the transfer of drones used in Ukraine without prior Security Council approval in violation of the 2015 resolution.
“This is a matter of life or death for the Ukrainian people,” Wood said. “It would be unconscionable to deny Ukraine the opportunity to speak at this meeting when it is experiencing the devastating effects of Iran’s violation of resolution 2231 firsthand.”
Britain’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward, who was chairing the council meeting, then called for a vote on whether Ukraine could participate. Twelve members voted “yes,” while China and Russia voted “no” and Mozambique abstained.
The US, Britain, France and Ukraine have urged UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to send investigators to Ukraine to examine debris from drones used in Russia’s attacks, insisting that Resolution 2231 gives him a mandate to open an investigation.
Russia insists he has no such authority and Nebenzia warned the UN Secretariat against taking any such action. Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani added that any UN findings “based on such illegal activities is null and void.”
UN political chief Rosemary DiCarlo said in her briefing to the council that France, Germany, Ukraine, the UK and US had written letters concerning alleged transfers of drones from Iran to Russia and had provided photographs and their analyzes of the recovered drones. “The Secretariat continues to examine the available information,” DiCarlo said, giving no indication of when or if a UN investigation would take place.
Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya told the council that more than 1,000 drone launches over Ukraine had been recorded and that analysis by Ukrainian and international experts confirmed their Iranian origin.
Russia’s Nebenzia accused Ukraine and the West of fomenting misinformation and dismissed the evidence as comical.
France, Germany and the UK, which are parties to the JCPOA, said in a joint statement that Iran has also been in violation of its nuclear commitments under the 2015 deal for four years.
They pointed to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports that Iran’s total stockpiles of enriched uranium are now 21 times the amount permitted under the 2015 nuclear deal — and the IAEA’s detection in January of uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent, which is almost at weapons-grade levels of 90 percent. Any stockpile of uranium at that level could be quickly used to produce an atomic bomb if Iran chooses.
The 2015 nuclear deal limited Tehran’s uranium stockpile to 300 kg and enrichment to 3.67 percent — enough to fuel a nuclear power plant. But following the US withdrawal, Tehran escalated its nuclear program and has been producing uranium enriched to 60 percent purity — a level for which nonproliferation experts already say Tehran has no civilian use.
Iran informed the IAEA that “unintended fluctuations” in enrichment levels may have occurred accounting for the particles enriched to 83.7 percent, and Iravani, the Iranian ambassador, and Russia’s Nebenzia both said the issue has been resolved.
France, Germany and the UK said Iran also “continues to develop and improve ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons,” pointing to a May 25 test of a missile they said is capable of delivering a warhead to a range of 2,000 km.
US Ambassador Wood said “Iran’s ballistic missile activity — especially in light of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and its threatening rhetoric — is an enduring threat to regional and international peace and security.”
Iravani countered that “Iran is fully determined to vigorously pursue its peaceful nuclear activities including enrichment.”
Negotiations on the US rejoining the deal and Iran returning to its commitments broke down last August. EU Ambassador Olof Skoog told the council the EU compromise text is still on the table “as a potential point of departure for any renewed effort to bring the JCPOA back on track.”
Iravani said: “We are still prepared for the resumption of negotiations should the other side be ready to do the same.”