Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager when clashes erupted during an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. The Israeli military said it was checking the report. The ministry, which identified the person killed as a 14-year-old, said clashes broke out overnight after Israeli troops entered the Palestinian city of Qalqiliya. Residents said a group of Palestinian youth threw stones at the soldiers operating in the area, Reuters reported.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held on Wednesday a tripartite closed meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and head of Hamas political bureau Ismail Haniyeh in Ankara. Sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that the talks focused on the meeting of the general secretaries to be held in Cairo on July 29-30 and the efforts to make the inter-Palestinian dialogue a success.
The Tunisian coast guard recovered 901 bodies of drowned migrants off its coast from Jan. 1 to July 20 this year, the country's interior minister, Kamel Feki, said on Wednesday, marking an unprecedented number of victims off the country's coasts. The country is facing a record wave of migration this year and frequent catastrophes of the sinking of boats of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa heading to Italian coasts.
When Elias Hrawi was elected president of the Lebanese Republic in November 1989, following the assassination of President Rene Mouawad, he found before him a wrecked state. Hrawi, along with Foreign Minister Fares Boueiz, was aware that the international community was tired of Lebanon and had delegated to Syria the handling of its affairs.