In an interview with Al Arabiya television channel, Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mechaal, based in Doha, Qatar, questioned the decision taken by the Palestinian Islamist movement in 2017, which then amended its charter to remove any reference to its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.
You have to get used to it, Israel is not a country like the others. Normalcy, the ultimate goal of the Zionist project, is still out of reach, in the way the world looks at the Jewish state or in the way it looks at itself. Who would have imagined that Benyamin Netanyahu’s downfall would be brought about by the most disparate, original and unlikely coalition on the planet’s political scene?
There’s no need to go to the Armani Hotel’s kosher restaurant unannounced. It’s better to book well in advance. As for the terrace, it is crowded, in order to be able to attend a unique show mixing water jets, sounds and lights. Draped in his white dishdasha, the traditional dress of the men of the Gulf, our interlocutor tells us that in the lounge of a large hotel in Dubai, he recently found himself the only Arab among dozens of Jews. “But if this continues, there will be more of them than us!” he says with a smile. When they signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020 normalising Emirati-Israeli relations, the Emiratis expected to welcome a wave of visitors from Tel Aviv. But it is a wave that has swept through the Gulf. As for the Western Jewish communities, they no longer say “next year in Jerusalem”, but “the next holiday in Dubai”!
The Americans are trying to sound out the French authorities discreetly to see if they would be prepared to deploy troops and/or air forces to Iraq. The aim is to fight against terrorism and to ward off attempts by ISIS to return in force. But also to fill the gap left by the American disengagement, in order to prevent the pro-Iranian militias from reversing the balance of power with the Baghdad government.
At a time when we are wondering about the consequences that the pandemic will have on our lives and children’s lives. At a time when the challenge of getting our economy back on its feet is obsessing our fellow citizens and our leaders, in the Zaatari camp in the Jordanian desert, 80,000 Syrian refugees try to survive in appalling conditions.
Since mid-February, when the Iranian regime was slow to acknowledge the global spread of the coronavirus epidemic – and denounced «a plot by the enemy», in the double context of the celebration of the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on February’11 and the parliamentary elections on February’21- Iran, which remains one of the main global hotbeds of the Covid-19 epidemic, has been worrying its neighboring countries. They were quick to close their borders on 19 February, with the announcement of the first infected persons in the Middle East.
