Middle Orient News

JERUSALEM – French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday that Israel and the Palestinians have made no real progress since a U.S.-sponsored peace conference in November, and called the situation dangerous.

ISMAILIA, Egypt  – A locally made Palestinian rocket exploded on the Egyptian side of the crossing point with Gaza on Sunday, damaging an Egyptian administrative building, security sources said. There were no injuries.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday, ending a long chapter in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.

GAZA – Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, has voiced confidence that Egypt will help it ease the effects of an Israeli blockade.

BAGHDAD – A female suicide bomber killed at least three people and wounded four others in central Baghdad, police said on Sunday, the latest such attack to be carried out by a woman.

GAZA – Israeli forces killed three Palestinian militants and a civilian during fighting in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Sunday, medical workers said.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Japan underlined its support for Tehran’s cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Here is a chronology of some of the main events in Lebanon since former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri was killed on February 14, 2005, along with 22 others.

BEIRUT – Three years after Rafik al-Hariri’s assassination, the crisis unleashed by his death opens ever deeper rifts in Lebanon and threatens the state and society the leader tried to rebuild after the civil war.

TEHRAN (FNA) – An earthquake, measuring 4.3 on the Richter scale, jolted a remote mountainous area in Iran’s central province of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiyari overnight.