Middle Orient

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Israel’s peace efforts with Syria should continue, without preconditions, after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert steps down, a candidate to succeed him said on Friday.

ISMAILIA, Egypt (Reuters) – Egyptian police shot dead an unidentified African migrant and detained two others while they were trying to cross illegally into Israel on Friday, a security official and a medical source said.

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered his security services on Thursday to release all pro-Hamas activists arrested in the occupied West Bank this week, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said.

ZAGREB (Reuters) – Israel’s ambassador in Croatia on Thursday condemned the funeral given to a World War Two concentration camp head, saying it insulted the memory of those killed in the camp run by Croatia’s Nazi-allied Ustasha regime.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Abu al-Abed Abu Karsh sees Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s political demise as almost irrelevant. For many Palestinians, Israeli governments come and go without ever bringing peace closer.

LONDON (Reuters) – Most headlines about Basra, the port city in southern Iraq that is home to the bulk of the country’s vast oil wealth, tend to focus on death, destruction and wasted opportunity after five years of war.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will try to reach an agreement in peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas before a new Israeli government takes office, an official close to Olmert said on Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The leader of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and several of his top lieutenants have recently left Iraq for Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian security forces arrested 15 Hamas activists, including four university lecturers, in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, in the latest sweep by Fatah against the Islamist group, witnesses said.

GAZA (Reuters) – Hamas released on Thursday a cameraman working with Germany’s ARD news network in the Gaza Strip after a nearly weeklong detention, security sources said.