
JERUSALEM: A disgraced senior Palestinian official at the centre of a sex tape scandal claims he was entrapped and says he has not abused his position. Rafiq Husseini, who also holds British citizenship, was dismissed last week as President Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff at the end of a long-running scandal. He was shown in [...]
April 14, 2010 | Posted in
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TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that world pressure on Iran, including talk of new sanctions, makes the Islamic republic more determined than ever to pursue its nuclear programme. His defiance came after US President Barack Obama vowed to ratchet up global pressure on Tehran to abandon its controversial atomic programme which he said [...]

JERUSALEM: Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu has moved to ease tensions with the US, describing the two countries’ relations as those of “allies and friends”. Mr Netanyahu also dismissed reports one of his confidants called US President Barack Obama a “disaster” for Israel. The US has criticised the building of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, which [...]
March 29, 2010 | Posted in
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JERUSALEM: Four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers died in clashes on the Gaza border on Friday, an army general said, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consulted his security cabinet on US pressure on settlement building. “An officer and a soldier were killed and two others slightly wounded in an exchange of fire with terrorists planting [...]
March 27, 2010 | Posted in
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LONDON: Britain announced Tuesday it was kicking out an Israeli diplomat over the use of fake British passports in the killing of a Hamas chief in Dubai, in a sharp escalation of tension triggered by the murder. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said there were “compelling reasons” suggesting that Israel was to blame for the forgeries [...]
March 24, 2010 | Posted in
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GAZA CITY: An Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip overnight injured four people, Palestinian security officials and witnesses said Tuesday. The Israeli army confirmed the air raid and said it hit a weapons storage facility. The four casualties, including a woman, were slightly hurt by shell fragments when an Israeli aircraft fired a missile [...]
March 23, 2010 | Posted in
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RAMALLAH: UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday that the international community “strongly supports” Palestinian efforts to build a state and branded all Israeli settlement activity illegal. He kicked off a two-day visit to the Palestinian territories and Israel aimed at restarting peace talks by meeting Palestinian premier Salam Fayyad in the West Bank political [...]
March 21, 2010 | Posted in
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JERUSALEM: Israeli aircraft hit a disused airport in southern Gaza on Friday night, injuring 11 people, two of them seriously, Palestinian medical officials and witnesses said. Four missiles hit the site, the witnesses said. The injured were all in the vicinity of the airport, near the town of Rafah. The facility itself has long been [...]
March 20, 2010 | Posted in
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JERUSALEM: Riots broke out in Jerusalem and the West Bank yesterday as Palestinians staged a “day of rage” in protest at Israeli plans to build 1,600 new homes in the disputed east of the city. The announcement of the planned construction caused the worst diplomatic crisis in decades between Israel and its most important ally, [...]

DUBAI: Dubai’s police chief has accused Israel of “vast falsification” of travel documents, noting that dozens of false passports were uncovered following a Hamas leader’s murder in the emirate. “I ring alarm bells. Israel is falsifying Western passports on a large scale. We discover forged passports on a daily basis,” Dahi Khalfan told AFP. “The world [...]
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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DUBAI: The Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was injected with a strong sedative before being suffocated in his hotel room by suspected Mossad agents, Dubai police have revealed. The results of a toxicology report released today show that the Hamas commander was paralysed by an injection of succinylcholine, a fast-acting muscle relaxant. He was then suffocated [...]
March 3, 2010 | Posted in
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SYDNEY: Israel’s Mossad has regularly faked Australian passports for its spies, an ex-agent said on Thursday, as anger grew over the use of foreign travel documents for an alleged assassination. Former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky told ABC public radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s hit [...]
February 26, 2010 | Posted in
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DUBAI: Police widened their search in the hunt for the killers of a top Hamas militant in a luxury hotel, saying 15 new Western passport holders are now suspects, with the total number sought now 26. A police statement said the 15, including the holders of six British and three French passports, are being sought [...]
February 25, 2010 | Posted in
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JERUSALEM: Israel’s parliamentary opposition leader on Tuesday praised the assassination of a Hamas commander by Mossad in Dubai last month, in the first such comment from a top official. Tzipi Livni of the centrist Kadima Party said the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was good, but she did not indicate who was behind the killing. “The [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
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DUBAI: Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas official assassinated in Dubai, was betrayed by a close associate, the emirate’s police chief claimed as it emerged today that the Palestinian’s murderers used more fake Irish passports. Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim described whoever leaked details of Mahbouh’s arrival to his assassins as “the real killer”, Abu Dhabi’s al-Khalij [...]

The hit squad that killed a senior Hamas official in Dubai may have entered the country using diplomatic passports, officials in the Emirates said yesterday as they called on Britain and other European countries whose documents were forged to launch a full inquiry. “There is still information that Dubai police will not make public for [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
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On Thursday, the same day that Israel’s ambassador to Britain was asked to tell the British government if he knew anything about the apparent use of cloned British passports by suspects in the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai last month, his embassy’s official Twitter feed posted a joking reference to the killing. After [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
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LONDON: Britain has flatly denied any foreknowledge of a Mossad plan to assassinate a top official of the Palestinian group Hamas, in Dubai, amidst angry accusations in Whitehall that Israel is seeking to deflect blame from itself by implicating others. British government sources dismissed as “nonsense” a report claiming the Israeli secret service had given [...]
February 20, 2010 | Posted in
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DUBAI: Interpol should help arrest the head of Mossad if Israel’s spy agency was responsible for the killing of a Hamas commander in Dubai, the emirate’s police chief said today. In comments to be aired on Dubai TV, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim called for Interpol to issue “a red notice against the head of [...]
February 19, 2010 | Posted in
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JERUSALEM: A key security operative of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas was under arrest in Syria tonight on suspicion of having helped an alleged Israeli hit squad identify Mahmoud al-Mabhouh before he was assassinated in Dubai. Palestinian sources in the Gulf confirmed Nahro Massoud, a Hamas security official, was in detention and under interrogation in [...]
February 18, 2010 | Posted in
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