JERUSALEM: Israel is failing to penalise Jewish settlers for attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank who enjoy “virtual impunity” from prosecution, Ramallah-based rights group Al Haq said yesterday.
In a 40-page report, Al Haq also called on the international community to avoid funding settler groups, a day after Israel and the European Union reached a compromise deal over funding for bodies operating in the occupied West Bank or east Jerusalem.
Settlers carrying out attacks, which involve the use of “live ammunition” and “the destruction and denial of access to property” have been left unpunished by the Israeli authorities, Al Haq charged.
“Settlers involved in the planning and perpetration of such acts have remained largely immune from the enforcement of the law and, in some cases, have even benefited from official support from state authorities,” it said.
South Yemen leader pulls out of talks
SANA’A: A south Yemeni separatist leader yesterday walked out of national reconciliation talks meant to chart a new constitution for US-allied Yemen, setting back efforts to keep the fragile country together.
The move could prompt other politicians to quit the talks and deepen instability in a country afflicted by Sunni Islamist militants, Shia Muslim rebels and a southern separatists. The Conference of National Reconciliation, launched in March as part of a 2011 Gulf-brokered power transfer deal that eased long-serving President Ali Abdullah Saleh out of office, has been struggling with demands by southern separatists to restore South Yemen, which merged with North Yemen in 1990.
Sectarian killings rising in Iraq
BAGHDAD: Police found the bodies of 13 people around Baghdad yesterday, the apparent victims of execution-style shootings that recalled the height of Iraq’s sectarian slaughter.
This year has been Iraq’s most violent since the Sunni-Shi’ite bloodbath of 2006-07, now with a resurgence of sectarian killings as well as a growing insurgent campaign of bomb and gun attacks targeting security forces and civilians. Police retrieved the corpses of eight men, blindfolded and handcuffed, in the mainly Sunni Muslim area of Arab Jubbor, south of Baghdad, yesterday. Agencies
