Middle Orient

Israeli troops killed a member of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s security force near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday, Palestinian security sources and the army said.

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency) Iraq said on Thursday it had not repudiated a 32-year-old border treaty with Iran, despite a declaration by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani that the accord was now void.

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency) A Turkish parliamentary delegation headed by AKP MP and foreign relations committee chairman Murat Mercan met with a number of senior Iranian officials here in Tehran this week.

Hamas will not release a captured Israeli soldier unless Israel meets its demand to free nearly 1,400 Palestinian prisoners, including 350 with life sentences, a leader of the Islamist group in Gaza said on Wednesday.

Behind concrete blast walls and battling a flickering power supply, Baghdad’s international film festival opened in a hotel on Wednesday in another sign of how improved security is bringing life back to the city.

A Turkish woman who was injured along with seven other people in a bomb blast in Istanbul on Tuesday has died from her wounds, state-run Anatolian news agency said on Wednesday.

Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq on Wednesday, Turkey’s general staff said, in the fourth such cross-border raid in five days.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet on Thursday to try to salvage peace talks bogged down by a row over Jewish settlements, Israeli officials said.

Iraq’s interior minister ordered the dismissal of Baiji’s police chief, after a suicide bomber killed at least 20 people and wounded 80 in the northern Iraqi town on Tuesday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

A suicide truck bomb killed at least 20 people and wounded 80 in the northern Iraqi city of Baiji on Tuesday, the police and U.S. military said, in the deadliest attack in Iraq for two weeks.