Palestina

Egypt on Thursday said it had sent medical and food aid to thousands of Palestinians stranded for over a month in increasingly dire conditions on the border with the Gaza Strip.

Bulgaria said on Wednesday (July 18th) it is sending an official request to Tripoli for the transfer of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV.

Israel has been passing messages to Syria for months through Turkey and has yet to receive assurances peace talks would lead Damascus to sever ties with Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah, officials said on Wednesday.

A year after his Fateh movement was trounced at the polls, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday he will call new legislative elections, a move designed to freeze the Islamist Hamas from power.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has called for early elections in the Palestinian territories, denouncing Hamas and declaring “even the devil cannot match their lies”.

The White House said Tuesday the international meeting on the Middle East proposed by President George W. Bush should not be viewed as “a big peace conference” and it is too early to say where or when it will be.

About 100 Palestinians smashed doors and windows inside an airport building in this Egypt-Gaza Strip border town early Tuesday after being trapped there for more than a month since the border’s closure, police and one of the rioters said.

Army troops are making “significant” gains in their long-running battle against Al Qaeda-inspired fighters barricaded inside a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, security officials said Tuesday.

Syrian President Bashar Assad called on Israel to respond to peace overtures from Damascus after he was sworn in for a second seven-year term on Tuesday.

Libya’s highest judicial body commuted to life in prison on Tuesday the sentences of six foreign medics who have been on death row for infecting children with the AIDS virus, an official said.