Middle Orient

GAZA (Reuters) – An Israeli air strike killed a militant who was trying to launch rockets from the northern Gaza Strip and another died in an explosion in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, militant sources, medics and the army said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A suicide car bomber exploded near the home of the leader of a small Iraqi Sunni Arab parliamentary party on Tuesday, killing two people and wounding four, police said.

Gunmen killed the head of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital, police said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of assassinations that has caused many of Iraq’s top medical practitioners to flee the country.

The European Union joined the United States on Monday in expressing concern about new Israeli settlement activity and urged Israel to stick to its commitments in Middle East peace efforts.

Lebanon’s presidential vote will be delayed again because rival factions are still haggling over ways to amend the constitution to allow the election of the army chief as the new president, political sources said on Monday.

At least 20 illegal migrants died when a boat carrying about 70 people sank off the Turkish Aegean coast on Saturday, authorities said on Monday.

Seven inmates in an Iraqi Interior Ministry jail were killed in a mortar attack in central Baghdad on Monday, an Iraqi security official said.

A rocket attack sparked a big fire at a domestic oil refinery in southern Baghdad on Monday but the plant was still operating, Iraqi police and officials said.

U.S. President George W. Bush, seeking a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians before he leaves office, will visit the Middle East in early January, the White House said. 

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey’s government is considering a new law to encourage members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to leave the separatist guerrilla group, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as saying on Sunday.