JERUSALEM: An ultra-conservative Jewish politician on Monday said he was resigning from his role in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government after failing to advance his agenda, but that he would still support the coalition in parliament.
Avi Maoz, whose Noam party had one of the Knesset’s 120 seats, was made a deputy minister in Netanyahu’s office as part of the coalition sworn in on Dec. 29, with responsibilities for encouraging stringent observance of Jewish law in the country.

HAWARA, West Bank: Suspected Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli-American motorist in the occupied West Bank on Monday after Jewish settlers rampaged through a Palestinian village in a burst of violence that defied US efforts to prod the sides to cooperate on security.
Israeli officials said in the latest incident Palestinians carried out several drive-by shootings on a highway near Jericho, killing an Israeli in his car before fleeing. The US State Department said the person killed was also a US citizen.

TEHRAN: Iran said Monday the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, will visit Tehran “in the coming days,” amid a row over uranium enrichment levels in the Islamic republic.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said earlier this month it was in discussions with Tehran after Bloomberg News reported that the watchdog’s inspectors in Iran had found uranium enriched to 84 percent purity.

LONDON: Iranian schoolgirls are being deliberately poisoned to keep them away from their studies, a government minister claimed in a report by the Fars News Agency.

Younes Panahi, Iran’s deputy health minister, said that “certain individuals sought the closure of all schools, especially girls’ schools,” and that pupils were being “deliberately poisoned with chemical compounds.”

In the city of Qom, hundreds of cases of respiratory poisonings have been reported since November, with 15 girls hospitalized over the past week alone.

NASIRIYAH, Iraq: Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers have witnessed a sharp decrease in their levels in the south of the country, officials said Sunday, pledging to take urgent measures to ease water shortages.
In Nasiriyah, capital of the southern province of Dhi Qar, an AFP photographer saw the river bed of the mighty Euphrates dry in patches.
The water ministry blamed the situation in some southern provinces on “the low quantity of water reaching Iraq from neighboring Turkiye.”