RAMALLAH: A Palestinian village surrounded by three Israeli settlements and an Israel Defense Forces military camp is in the grip of a severe water crisis, community leaders have revealed.

Nearly 3,500 residents of Duma village in Jordan Valley in the northern West Bank are struggling to find enough drinking water to meet their basic needs and sustain livestock. And many of them cannot afford the $100 cost of buying a water tank.

AL-MUKALLA: Rights groups on Monday urged governments worldwide to donate generously to a UN fundraising campaign to rescue an oil tanker in Yemen.

Organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Mwatana for Human Rights, and International Crisis Group wrote a joint letter calling on the US, the UK, the EU, and others to swiftly allocate funds to the UN emergency operations to prevent the tanker from triggering a major environmental disaster.

BERLIN: Germany and Egypt have agreed to cooperate on building out the hydrogen economy as part of Europe’s efforts to diversify away from its current dependence on Russian gas, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said after meeting with the Egyptian President.
“For the transformation of industry in countries like Germany, electricity and hydrogen will be crucial,” Scholz said at a news conference with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. “Much of that hydrogen will be imported,” he added, describing Germany’s need for gas imports as a “very big opportunity” for other countries.

ANKARA: Turkey can still “freeze” Sweden and Finland’s membership in NATO unless the two countries take steps that meet Ankara’s security demands, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday.
Last month, Turkey lifted its objection to Sweden and Finland joining the alliance but warned that it would block the process if they fail to extradite suspects with links to outlawed Kurdish groups or the network of an exiled cleric accused of orchestrating a failed coup in 2016.

LONDON: The countries of the Middle East are “backward-looking,” unfriendly, or even hostile to Western nations, and fail to share their values or aspirations.

These are the worrying and outdated perceptions of people in four Western nations — the UK, US, France and Germany — surveyed in a new poll conducted for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

The same poll, however, reveals that, in fact, Arabs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Tunisia “deeply respect the US and its values of freedom, innovation, and opportunity.”