RAMALLAH: Israeli occupation forces on Monday uprooted about 100 olive trees in the Wadi Sa’ir area, east of the southern West Bank city of Hebron, in order to claim the land for military use, according to a local dignitary.

“This is a new crime added to the crimes of the Israeli occupation, and we condemn this new aggression on Palestinian land,” Musa Al-Farroukh, the mayor of the town of Sa’ir, said.

RAMALLAH: Pictures and a video message posted by Palestinian hunger striker Khalil Al-Awawdeh have shocked Palestinian public opinion and the EU, which criticized Israel’s continued detention of him without trial.

Al-Awawdeh’s message came three days before 4,600 Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons began an open hunger strike to protest their poor conditions in detention.

BEIRUT: Satellite imagery showed widespread destruction at a giant military facility in western Syria targeted in a recent Israeli airstrike, and the head of a Syrian opposition war monitor said Sunday the strike targeted a depot housing hundreds of middle-range missiles for Iran-backed fighters.
Syrian state media reported after the Thursday night attack near the cities of Tartus and Hama that two people were wounded and fires were sparked in nearby forests. It added that the missiles were fired from over the Mediterranean and most of them were shot down.

LONDON: Businesses in Egypt are discriminating against women who wear a hijab, a BBC Arabic investigation found.

According to the news outlet, several Egyptian women have claimed venues refused them entry because they were wearing the traditional headscarf.

BBC News Arabic tried to make reservations at 15 upmarket venues in Cairo that had been accused of discrimination.

Most of the venues requested the social media profiles of all guests, and 11 of them said that hijab-wearing women were not allowed entry.

AL-MUKALLA: Yemen government officials and rights groups have urged the Iran-backed Houthis to stop torturing four abducted journalists held inside their prisons and to urgently send them to hospital as they are suffering from life-threatening diseases.

Yemenis say that the Houthis have subjected the journalists to physical and psychological torture in detention, throwing them into solitary confinement and depriving them of vital medicine.