LONDON: Morocco’s King Mohammed VI held a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday, the kingdom’s state news agency MAP reported.
During the call, the king recalled the strong and special ties that bind the Jewish community of Moroccan origin to the Moroccan monarchy. 
He also “reaffirmed the kingdom’s steadfast and unchanging position on the Palestinian issue, as well as its pioneering role in promoting peace and stability in the Middle East.”
King Mohammed commended the reactivation of diplomatic ties and restoration of communication between the two countries.
Netanyahu told the king he was determined to implement all commitments made according to their specific timetable.
An Israeli statement issued said both leaders spoke about moving forward with a US-brokered agreement announced earlier this month to normalize bilateral ties.
It added that Netanyahu also thanked King Mohammed for hosting an official Israeli delegation this week and invited the king to visit the Jewish state.
Israel and Morocco agreed on Dec. 10 to normalize relations in a deal brokered with US help, making Morocco the fourth Arab country to set aside hostilities with Israel in the past four months.
It joins the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan in beginning to forge deals with Israel, driven in part by US-led efforts to present a united front against Iran and roll back Tehran’s regional influence.
Prior to that only Egypt and Jordan had official ties with Israel, signed in 1979 and 1994 respectively. 
(With Reuters)

ANKARA: Claims that Turkish police routinely strip search women detainees have sparked a war of words between the government and opposition MPs.
Pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party MP Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu recently said that female suspects and detainees had been subjected to humiliating strip searches by police in provinces across Turkey.
Recently a group of female prisoners in the Aegean province of Usak claimed they had been forced to undress before being searched.
However, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu has denied the allegations and accused Gergerlioglu of being a “terrorist.”
“The person who casts such an aspersion on the Turkish police without proof is a rascal, dishonorable and low. Gergerlioglu is a terrorist,” Soylu said.
But Gergerlioglu, a member of parliamentary human rights investigation commission, said that he was being attacked for revealing the truth.
“I stand against sexual harassment of women, men and children,” he said.
The MP’s allegations have been supported by thousands of prisoners who told dissident media outlets about their experiences of systematic sexual violence at the hands of police.
Among the claims are that children of women detainees have had their diapers checked for contraband items.
An investigation was launched on Dec. 23 after women shared accounts on social media of being strip searched.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s prisons and detention authority has defended its controversial use of strip searching — or what it calls a “detailed search” — at its jails, calling it a “necessary” and “exceptional” practice to prevent the smuggling of forbidden items into prisons.
Strip searches are permitted under Turkish legislation if the detainee is believed to be carrying weapons or knives.
According to the Human Rights Association of Turkey, almost 170 women have been beaten in the past year after refusing to be searched.
Mustafa Yeneroglu, deputy chair of the DEVA Party, a breakaway from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), said that he has been following up similar claims in recent months.
“The interior minister makes baseless allegations, and defends silencing Turkish people and subjecting them to ill-treatment. He even terrorizes the judiciary as he sees the rule of law as a burden for the government,” he told Arab News.
Yeneroglu, who was previously the chair of the parliamentary human rights committee, said that the government should have investigated the allegations and “done whatever is necessary if there is a crime.”
He claimed that four women recently had been subjected to a strip search before being admitted into a detention facility in Usak province.
“If you brand these people terrorists, all such practices are being legitimized. They only search the bodies of political prisoners, not those convicted of drug dealing, for example” he said.
Some women from conservative family backgrounds needed psychological support afterwards, Yeneroglu claimed.
“They couldn’t even confess this traumatic experience to their own families. They cannot sue the authorities because they are also going through a terror investigation,” he said.
Yeneroglu described strip searches as “dehumanizing” and “a serious act of humiliation.”
“It is a violation of human dignity and now has become common practice on political prisoners,” he added.
The hashtag “don’t stay silent to strip searches” remained among trending topics on Twitter.
During his weekly parliamentary group meeting on Dec. 22, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, also said that he believed the claims were genuine.
A dissident female journalist, Aslihan Gencay, could spend an additional year in prison after objecting to a strip search when she was due to be transferred to another facility. She was placed in solitary confinement for three days and now faces a prison investigation.

CAIRO: A Libyan commander who launched an offensive last year to capture the capital Tripoli from the Government of National Accord (GNA) threatened Thursday to use force against Turkish troops if Ankara doesn’t stop interfering in the war-stricken North African country.
Khalifa Haftar’s comments came in response to the Turkish parliament’s decision to extend for 18 months a law that allows the deployment of Turkish troops to Libya. Turkish military assistance to the Tripoli-based government — including advisers, equipment and intelligence — helped stop Haftar’s year-long offensive on the capital. Turkey has also been accused of sending thousands of Syrian mercenaries to Libya.
“There will be no security or peace as long as the boots of the Turkish military are desecrating our immaculate soil,” Haftar said in comments from his eastern stronghold, Benghazi, on the 69th anniversary of Libya’s independence day. “We will carry weapons to bring about peace with our own hands and our free will.”
Libya descended into chaos following the 2011 uprising that ousted and killed longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Since 2015, Libya has been divided between two governments, one in the east and one in the west.
Haftar has been allied with the eastern government, while Turkey has supported the GNA.
The Turkish lawmakers’ decision came Tuesday, despite a UN-brokered cease-fire in Libya declared in October. The cease-fire deal envisioned the departure of foreign forces and mercenaries within three months.
“The colonizing enemy has one of two choices: either to leave peacefully or to be driven out by force,” Haftar said, referring to Turkey.
The UN Support Mission in Libya seized the same national occasion to urge Libya’s rivals to observe the cease-fire and respect a political roadmap that envisages the holding of national elections in December 2021.
“While the Mission calls on Libyans to consolidate their efforts and take courageous steps toward national reconciliation, and to look forward to a bright future for all Libyans to live in peace and prosperity, it affirms its full commitment to assisting the Libyan people in building their unified state,” a UNSMIL statement issued Thursday said.
Earlier this month, 75 Libyan politicians from opposing camps convened virtually in a UN-initiated political forum and agreed to hold elections next year. However, they failed to break a deadlock on the selection mechanism for the transitional government that would run the country in the lead-up to the vote.
“A tenuous cease-fire continues to hold in Libya between forces allied to the Tripoli-based government and their rivals in the east,” said a commentary published Thursday by The International Crisis Group. “Yet there is reason to worry that the five-month hiatus in the conflict could end abruptly.”
In recent weeks, both governments have traded accusations of violating the terms of the cease-fire deal by continuing to mobilize their troops near front lines and receiving military assistance from their respective regional backers.

ANAKARA: A new poll showed a hostile picture among Turks to the integration of Syrian refugee population in the country.

The survey, entitled “Dimensions of Polarization in Turkey 2020,” was conducted by Istanbul Bilgi University in cooperation with German Marshall Fund of the United States through face-to-face interviews across 29 cities with a representative sample of 4,000 people from Turkey’s adult population.

It found that 86 percent of respondents want the 4 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey to go back home, a question that has become a common denominator across almost all political parties.

More than 3.6 million refugees fled to Turkey following the civil war in Syria in 2011, but the Syrian community in Turkey has been the target of several violent attacks and murders over recent years.

Turks consider the presence of Syrian refuges as a burden on their livelihood and as a source of unfair competition in the labor market with unregistered Syrians, informal businesses and thousands of Syrian-led companies launched each year arousing great concern.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that Turkey welcomed millions of Syrian refugees who were fleeing the civil war, but the current statistics showed social acceptance of refugee population was falling.

“It is a sign of a lack of Turkish leadership — of the false demonization of refugees as scapegoats for Turkey’s economic and other problems — that so many people in Turkey have now turned on the refugees, even though the deadly threats to them remain the same in Syria,” he told Arab News.

Deniz Senol Sert, a migration expert from Ozyegin University in Istanbul, agrees.

“During the local elections of March 2019, Turkish government used the refugee issue as a bargaining chip both domestically and at the international front. It sent the message to its own voters and to the EU that it can open the gates for letting all these refugees flood into European countries,” she said.

The Turkish authorities therefore keep signaling to Turkish society that the flow of Syrian refugees is in their control, while they are also sending a warning to the EU, which is reluctant to offer visa-free access to Europe to Turkish citizens.

In the meantime, Sert added, the government legitimized its controversial cross-border military operations into Syria with a so-called safe zone project to settle all refugees living in Turkey.

“Syrian refugees in Turkey are well aware that they are not welcomed by the host community. They even face serious obstacles when they try to open new business in Turkey although it is a kind of integration tool for this community. Neither the government nor the opposition parties can produce a pro-integration discourse to change these worrying statistics in a positive direction,” she said.

Last year, Turkish government approved the deportation of 1,000 Syrians in a week from Istanbul to Syria’s Idlib province, sparking debate about the timing of the move.

Sert said that the projects that involve Syrians are mostly conducted with a top-down approach, although in the European countries the municipalities assume this responsibility because they know the real problems and expectations on the ground.

“There are ideological and structural deficiencies that push people to consolidate their anti-refugee stance, and this trend feeds into frequent racist attacks on Syrians in Turkey,” she said.

In October, a Syrian refugee named Muhammed Dip Hurih was killed in a dispute with his Turkish neighbors over parking in the southeastern province of Gaziantep, while in the same month a 14-year-old Syrian child was stabbed to death in central Anatolia.

On Thursday, the European Commission has extended two humanitarian flagship programs in Turkey until early 2022 to provide basic needs to more than 1.8 million refugees and assist more than 700,000 children to continue their education.

But the EU programs are not seen as enough to boost integration by the society at large, with Turkish government accusing Brussels of falling short on its commitments of financial support.

Similarly, Syrians Barometer, a survey released last year under the coordination of Murat Erdogan, a professor at the Turkish-German University in Istanbul, showed that Turkish society considers the issue of Syrians as one of its top 3 problems.

“The Syrian refugees have turned into a politicized topic that reflects the already established political divisions within the society. The voters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) follow their party’s political line, while the opposition designs its emotional stance according to their political disapprovals,” Prof. Erdogan said.

“Even in places such as southeastern Sanliurfa province, known for its multicultural characteristics, 70 percent of residents are against street signs in Arabic. The first flow of Syrian refugees has been perceived as a project of the ruling government to change local demographics. Granting citizenships to the Syrian refugees were also perceived negatively by different segments of the society,” he added.

However, Prof. Erdogan also underlines that his survey showed that 85 percent of Turkish citizens prefer isolating Syrian refugees in camps or in safe zones rather than having them integrated into the society.
 

AMMAN: The Jerusalem District Court issued a temporary restraining order against the city’s Israeli-run municipality on Thursday, forcing the municipality to cease its conversion of the waqf-owned Al-Yousefieh cemetery into a park.

In a press statement issued on Wednesday, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, Dhaifallah Fayez, reiterated Jordan’s “rejection and condemnation of the excavations and leveling works carried out by the Israeli authorities at the cemetery’s fence and stairs.” Jordan described the action as “desecration of graves” and called on the Israelis to immediately stop the operation.

Wasfi Kailani, senior official on Jerusalem Affairs and director of the Hashemite Fund for the Restoration of Al-Aqsa Mosque, told Arab News, “The case is important because it sheds a light on the continued acts of desecration against a cemetery that is still being used these days by Jerusalem’s Muslims. This is a documented waqf property and the cemetery — which is named after the son of Salah Eddine, Yusef bin Ayoub — is sacred to Muslims around the world, especially for Jordan and the Arab Legion (the former Jordanian army).”

Kailani said that official complaints had been filed with the Israeli government and UNESCO in 2014 and 2016. ”We have known for some time that Israel had its eyes on this land near the wall adjacent to Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Lion’s Gate,” he said, adding that those complaints had included “documentation of Israeli authorities pouring concrete below and over existing graves in order to stop Muslims (burying) their dead at this location.”

The municipality’s plans for the park reportedly include a memorial erected by Jerusalemites with the approval of former Israeli mayor Teddy Kosleck to honor members of the Jordanian army who were killed in the 1967 war. Kailani claimed that would cause emotional hurt and damage to the families of the dead.

“Imagine the reaction of families of these brave Jordanian soldiers who are buried at the site as they see kids playing and dancing on the graves of their deceased martyrs,” he said.
Palestinian lawyers Muhaad Jabara and Hamzeh Quteieh told Arab News that the court’s decision means that the municipality’s actions were illegal.