RAMALLAH: Most Palestinians will remember 2022 as a painful year in terms of the scale of human loss, the increase in Israeli aggression, and the election of an extreme right-wing Israeli government that will further deny them their rights.

Ibrahim Melhem, spokesman for the Palestinian government, told Arab News that 2022 was “the worst year in terms of the high number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.”

According to official figures, 225 people were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip over the past 12 months.

BEIRUT: At least 3,825 people have died in Syria’s war in 2022, the lowest yearly toll since the start of the conflict more than a decade ago, a war monitor said on Saturday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had put the death toll at 3,746 throughout 2021, before revising it up to 3,882.
After years of deadly battle and bombardments following the brutal suppression of 2011 anti-regime protests, the conflict has largely abated in the last three years.

CAIRO: The Daesh group said Saturday that it carried out a deadly attack on an Egyptian police checkpoint in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia the previous day.
“A cell of soldiers of the caliphate managed to attack an Egyptian police roadblock… with a machine gun,” the jihadist group’s Amaq news agency said.
Three Egyptian policemen were killed in the attack, the first of its kind in nearly three years in mainland Egypt, which has largely been spared the deadly insurgency in the nearby Sinai peninsula.

On Saturday, Saudi Arabia condemned the attack.

SULAIMANIYAH: Police in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region said they had arrested 16 young men after a viral video showed a teenage girl being attacked at a motorcycle rally.
The incident took place in the suburbs of Sulaimaniyah, the Kurdistan region’s second city, where footage shared online showed dozens of young men and teenage boys following the girl before some of them assaulted her, kicking her against a car.

DUBAI: Iran’s military launched a drone to warn off a reconnaissance plane trying to approach Iranian war games on the Gulf coast, the semi-official Fars news agency said on Saturday.

The report did not specify the nationality of the reconnaissance aircraft, but Iranian forces have had repeated similar confrontations with US forces in the Gulf.

There was no immediate US reaction available.

Iran launched annual joint naval, air, and ground exercises in the Gulf on Friday near the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway.