RAMALLAH: Officials from the Israeli armed forces have been making plans to forcibly move about 1,000 Palestinians from villages in Masafer Yatta, near southern Hebron in the southern West Bank, without the Israeli government’s knowledge, according to Israeli sources.

The army’s Central District Command began preparations in November to displace the residents so that the military can conduct regular training exercises in the area, the sources said.

ANKARA: Turkiye, Syria and Russia aim to schedule a meeting of their foreign ministers this month and possibly before the middle of next week, though no date or location has yet been chosen, a senior Turkish official said on Wednesday.

Such a meeting would mark the highest-level talks between Ankara and Damascus since the Syrian war began in 2011 and signal a further thaw in ties.

LONDON: In a letter written inside Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, Sepideh Qolian, a prominent female Iranian activist, revealed how prisoners are tortured to extract confessions, the BBC reported.

Qolian was arrested in 2018 and convicted of acting “against national security” for her support of a strike and protest by workers at a sugar factory in Iran’s Khuzestan province. She is serving a five-year sentence and studying law in prison.

ISTANBUL: A Turkish court on Wednesday released an internationally respected medic who outraged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by backing a probe into the army’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Iraq.

Turkish Medical Association head Sebnem Korur Fincanci was detained and jailed in October for using a television interview to highlight claims that first surfaced in media close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

The militia alleged that 17 of its fighters had died in Turkish chemical weapons attacks in the mountains of northern Iraq that month.

JERUSALEM: Bolstered Israeli restrictions against flying the Palestinian flag are “a shameless attempt to legitimize racism,” rights group Amnesty International said Tuesday.
Israel’s new firebrand National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the police commander on Sunday to authorize officers to remove Palestinian flags flying in public spaces.
“I have instructed the Israeli police to enforce the ban on flying a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) flag in public spaces, a sign of identification with a terrorist organization,” Ben-Gvir wrote on Twitter.