Middle Orient

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran is hoping that the UN Security Council will not adopt a new resolution on sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program, the foreign minister said on Saturday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran Air, the national airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has purchased 9 new airplanes during the current Iranian calendar year (started March 21, 2007), Managing Director Saeed Hesami said here on Thursday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is in Davos to participate in the World Economic Forum, has said Iran has been supporting his country since the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran’s top military commander said Saturday that his forces would retaliate against American military bases in the Persian Gulf if they are involved in any possible future attack on Iran.

GAZA – Hamas offered on Saturday to restore the Gaza Strip’s ruptured border with Egypt through direct diplomacy with Cairo, challenging a plan by rival Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to assume control.

JERUSALEM – Israeli police shot a Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli border policeman near Jerusalem on Saturday, Israeli police and ambulance workers said.

BAGHDAD – Iraqi security forces have begun a “decisive” final offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq to push the Sunni Islamist militants out of their last major stronghold in the north, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Friday.

BEIRUT – A car bomb killed a police intelligence officer involved in the investigation of assassinations in Lebanon, in an attack in a Christian suburb of Beirut on Friday.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Iran’s permanent envoy to the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization condemned Israel’s crimes in Gaza, and urged the UN body to take urgent measures to rescue lives of innocent Palestinian citizens, specially teenage patients under treatment in Gaza hospitals.

TEHRAN (FNA) – Senegal’s Defense Minister Becaye Diop is scheduled to arrive here in Tehran on Sunday.