Several Palestinians who had been rearrested in Israel after being freed because of a prisoner exchange are going to stage a hunger strike on Tuesday, Ramallah-based Prisoners’ Club said on Monday. The strike will be observed by 63 of the 1,027 prisoners who were freed by a swap arrangement in 2011. Since June, when 3 Israeli teens were allegedly kidnapped …

Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus on Monday said that around 130,000 Syrians have flooded across the border in Turkey as Kurdish soldiers continued battling the Islamic State (IS) in their attempts to capture the strategically located town of Ain al-Arab. A spokesman for the IS in a statement issued by the group urged Muslims all over the world to …

Prominent Shi’ite scholar Sayyed Hani Fahs and popular opponent of Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian civil war passed away in Beirut on Thursday, succumbing to a long-term illness. The 68-year-old had been in a coma after he was admitted to a hospital a few days ago. A moderate figure who commanded respect both outside and inside the Shi’ite community, Fahs …

On Friday, French President Francois Hollande spoke to press personnel after his meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas in Paris,and said that a “solution to the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis will be presented to the UN Security Council. “We will have a resolution, to be presented to the Security Council, that will say very clearly what we …

On Friday, The White House warned that training and providing arms to moderate rebel troops in Syria to fight the Islamic State (IS) will take months, only a day after the US Congress approved the plan in a rare show of bipartisanship. “We will move out as rapidly as can be done, in partnership with the countries that will host …

South African Muslim academic Taj Hargey has pledged to go ahead and start a woman-friendly and gay-friendly mosque in his country, despite receiving several death threats over the issue. Taj Hargey is the director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, an organization of “forward thinking” Muslims; Hargey says that his Open Mosque will welcome people of all sexual orientations, …

On Friday, France conducted its first air strike on the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, augmenting strikes conducted by the United States strikes and boosting its efforts to unite global powers against the threat the extremists pose. After France famously refused to participate in the US-led invasion of the Iraq in 2003, it became the first country to join the …

UN Human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein said that smugglers accused of sinking a boat, causing the deaths of around 500 migrants, are probably guilty of “mass murder” and should be put on trial. “The callous act of deliberately ramming a boat full of hundreds of defenseless people is a crime that must not go unpunished. If the survivors’ …

Western powers on Thursday told Iran that it must cooperate with the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigation team looking into suspected nuclear weapon research conducted by the country if it wants an expansive nuclear deal which would lift some sanctions. The warning was given out after a board meeting of the IAEA at Vienna, as negotiators from six …

Extremists from the Islamic State (IS) have captured several villages around the city of Ain al-Arab thanks to heavy weaponry, as they closed in on the third largest Syrian town, the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights said on Thursday. “IS fighters have seized at least 21 villages around Kobane”, the Observatory’s director Rami Abdel Rahman said, referring to the town …