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Abbas announces Palestinians will vote in new elections this year
Mahmoud Abbas has fired the starting gun on presidential and parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza - 15 years after Palestinians last went to the polls. The Palestinian president signed a decree on Friday scheduling parliamentary elections for 22 May. Presidential elections will follow two months later on 31 July, with a vote for the Palestinian National Council - the PLO's elected body - scheduled on 31 August. Palestinians last voted in a presidential election in 2005 when Abbas won a four-year term. Parliamentary elections were held a year later but resulted in a victory for Islamist terror group Hamas, which then staged a violent coup in Gaza in 2007. Hamas has agreed to the new elections as part of the latest efforts to broker a reconciliation agreement between it and Abbas' Fatah movement. Numerous previous deals have fallen apart, not least because of Hamas' unwillingness to give up its weapons. Abbas has scheduled - and then cancelled - elections on previous occasions and there is scepticism about whether the new polls will go ahead. Polls indicate that, should be chose to run again, the 85-year-old Abbas faces defeat by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Abbas' move is seen by some as an effort to curry favour with the incoming Biden administration. “Abbas may want to restore his legitimacy in front of the international community, after ruling for so many years without elections. The regional picture has also changed dramatically over the last few months, with the normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab states,” said Palestinian political analyst Jihad Harb. The PA says it will request the elections also take place in East Jerusalem.
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Labour calls for new approach to Iran and tougher nuclear deal
A new tougher nuclear deal with Iran is needed, the shadow Middle East minister Wayne David has argued. In a piece for The House Magazine, David calls for the incoming Biden administration to rejoin the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and offer Iran relief from the crippling sanctions imposed by Donald Trump, arguing that the US has approach has had "the opposite of the intended effect". But the frontbencher also accuses Tehran of "deliberately" breaching the agreement and says restoring the Islamic republic's compliance with the nuclear deal is not enough to "address all the concerns raised by Iran's activities". "The JCPOA says nothing about Iran’s ballistic missile programme, which is designed to deliver nuclear weapons, nor its support for terrorist groups and militias throughout the Middle East," David argues. "These issues need to be addressed and although the British government believes that a long-term perspective is needed, there is an imperative to move those issues firmly up the international agenda." A new agreement - coupled with a "strengthened" inspection ability for the International Atomic Energy Agency - must include "much more than restricting and monitoring the country’s nuclear capability, important as that is", David writes. He also urges Britain and the EU to "intensify their dialogue with Israel and the Gulf States" with the goal of easing regional tensions. The shadow minister argues that Britain must also take a tougher stance on Iran's gross abuses of human rights. "Britain needs to go beyond its current approach of discrete pressure and actively consider extending Magnitsky-style sanctions against key perpetrators," he suggests, while also accusing Tehran of "state hostage taking".
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PA expects first vaccine shipment as Israel aims for 250,000 jabs a day
The Palestinian Authority said on Tuesday that the first shipment of covid vaccines - which had been expected "within days" - had been delayed until mid-February for "technical reasons". Last week, the PA health ministry granted emergency approval for the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine. It is one of four providers with which the PA has signed contracts. Israel has already approved Ramallah's request for the shipment of an initial 5,000 doses to enter the West Bank via the Allenby Crossing. The PA said in December it would receive 4 million doses of the Sputnik vaccine in all. The PA, which has responsibility for healthcare under the Oslo Accords, says it expects to have sufficient doses to vaccinate 70 percent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza by mid-March. Israel's prison service also announced on Sunday that it was beginning to vaccinate all prisoners, including an estimated 4,400 Palestinians held in its jails. Health minister Yuli Edelstein said last week that the first doses would begin arriving in prisons within days. The developments came as the Israeli government ordered the country's four health maintenance organisations to begin vaccinating all those over the age of 40. As of Tuesday morning, 2.19 million Israelis have received their first dose of the vaccine and 423,000 have received the second dose. Israel continues to outpace the world in the number of vaccines doses adminstered per 100,000 people. More than 30 percent of Israelis have now been vaccinated, with the UAE close to 20 percent. The UK is on 6.65 percent and the US on 3.71 percent. Edelstein said on Tuesday that Israel now aims to inoculate 250,000 people per day.
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IMAGES: Gideon Saar > Ziv Koren (זיו קורן), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Mahmoud Abbas > Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Iran nuclear deal > Dragan Tatic, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Coronavirus > Alissa Eckert, MSMI, Dan Higgins, MAMS, Public Health Image Library
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