ISTANBUL: Turkiye said a Kurdish militia killed two people in mortar attacks from northern Syria on Monday, in an escalation of cross-border retaliation following Turkish air operations at the weekend and a deadly bomb attack in Istanbul a week ago.

Turkiye’s armed forces said it was responding, and a senior security official told Reuters that Turkish jets had again started hitting targets in northern Syria.

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu won a defamation suit on Monday against a predecessor who had alleged that he, his wife and his son were mentally ill, with the court deeming the remarks a bid to harm Netanyahu’s political career.
Netanyahu’s lawyer hailed the ruling as “the shattering of another libel” — an allusion to his client’s assertion of innocence in three graft trials that overshadowed his last term as premier and are complicating his efforts to retake power.

GAZA CITY: Investigators said on Sunday that last week’s massive apartment fire in the Gaza Strip was ignited accidentally by a man using gasoline in a party trick, but did not explain how they reached that conclusion. 

The blaze killed 22 members of the same family and there were no survivors who could have described the events.

The fire had erupted on Thursday in the third-floor apartment of the Abu Raya family home in the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. 

Officials initially said 21 people were killed. 

PARIS: Activists have expressed alarm that Iran was implementing a major crackdown in a Kurdish-populated town that has seen intense anti-regime protests in the last few days.

Reinforcements of the security forces were sent to the city of Mahabad in western Iran, rights groups said, while images and audio files of heavy gunfire and screams were posted overnight.

CAIRO: Customs at Cairo International Airport have thwarted an attempt to smuggle three ivory statues that are prohibited from being exported or traded.

The statues were seized, preventing their export in a shipment of personal belongings to Lebanon.

Legal measures are underway in accordance with Presidential Decree No. 102 of 1983 to implement Egypt’s accession to the CITES convention and Egyptian Environmental Law No. 4 of 1994, and its amendments.