Benjamin Netanyahu Wins Israeli Election
Plus: Pope in Bahrain, Israel and Lebanon sign gas deal, how Iran tracks protesters' phones, and more.
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Benjamin Netanyahu wins Israeli election
Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won Israel's legislative election and is set to return to power as head of Israel's most right-wing government.
Final results showed Netanyahu's Likud Party and its ultranationalist and religious partners capturing a solid majority in Israel's Knesset, or parliament.
The acting prime minister, Yair Lapid, conceded defeat and called Netanyahu to congratulate him shortly before the final results were released. Lapid said he had instructed his staff to prepare an organized transition of power.
According to the unofficial final results, Netanyahu and his ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox allies captured 64 seats in Israel's 120-seat Knesset. His opponents in the outgoing coalition, led by Lapid, won 51 seats, with the remainder held by a small unaffiliated Arab faction. Netanyahu still has to conduct negotiations with his partners but is expected to form a coalition in the coming weeks.
In Bahrain, pope speaks out against death penalty and discrimination
Pope Francis spoke against the death penalty on Thursday, November 3, at the start of a trip to Bahrain, where the Shi'ite Muslim opposition accuse the Sunni monarchy of overseeing human rights abuses and families of death row inmates had sought help from the pontiff.
The visit, only the second by a pope to the Arabian Peninsula, is aimed at improving ties with the Islamic world but has thrust him into the Sunni-Shi'ite rights divide in Bahrain, which crushed a pro-democracy uprising in 2011.
The pope's visit has drawn attention to tensions between the Sunni-led government and the Shi'ite community that led sizeable pro-democracy protests in the 2011 "Arab Spring," which Bahrain quashed with Saudi and UAE help.
Bahrain has imprisoned thousands of protesters, journalists, and activists, some in mass trials, since the uprising and cracked down on later dissent and sporadic unrest, in which bomb attacks targeted security forces.
Israel, Lebanon sign U.S.-brokered historic maritime border deal
Israel and Lebanon have officially approved a historic United States-brokered agreement laying out their maritime boundary for the first time, which opens up the possibility for both countries to conduct offshore energy exploration.
Lebanon's President Michel Aoun signed a letter at the presidential palace on Thursday, October 27, that will be submitted to U.S. officials at Lebanon's southernmost border point of Naqoura later in the day.
Israel's government also ratified the agreement on the same day.
The agreement comes after months of indirect talks mediated by Amos Hochstein, the US envoy for energy affairs, and US President Joe Biden welcomed the deal.
The two countries have no diplomatic relations and have formally been at war since Israel's creation in 1948.
Under the terms of the deal, Israel received full rights to explore the Karish field, which is estimated to have natural gas reserves of 2.4 trillion cubic feet (68 billion cubic meters).
In turn, Lebanon received full rights in the Qana field but agreed to allow Israel a share of royalties through a side agreement with the French company TotalEnergies for the section of the field that extends beyond the agreed maritime border.
Critics of the deal have said it does little to address the issue of profit distribution but defers agreeing on what royalties Israel will get from the Qana field to a future date.
As soon as Lebanon signed what officials and the media called a 'historic deal' with Israel over maritime borders, a new challenge resurfaced in the north of the country.
If you want to find out what is behind the maritime dispute between Lebanon and Syria, read my article on The New Arab.
Lebanon's Aoun leaves presidential palace as power vacuum looms
Michel Aoun was vacating Lebanon's presidential palace on Sunday, October 30, amid acclaim from his supporters a day before his mandate expires without a designated successor, threatening a new power vacuum in the crisis-torn country.
Lebanese lawmakers have tried but failed four times in a month to agree on electing a successor after Aoun's six-year term.
Neither the Hezbollah camp nor its opponents have the clear majority to impose a candidate to succeed him.
Lebanon is being run by a caretaker government as political divisions have prevented the formation of a new cabinet ever since legislative elections in the spring.
How Iran can track and control protesters' phones
The Intercept, an American non-profit news organization, obtained confidential documents that show how the Iranian government program lets authorities monitor and manipulate people's phones.
As furious anti-government protests swept Iran, the authorities retaliated with both brute force and digital repression.
While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well.
Part of Iran's data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called "SIAM," a web program for remotely manipulating cellular connections made available to the Iranian Communications Regulatory Authority.
According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks.
It provides its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones.
The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests — or those of tomorrow.
Russia agrees to rejoin Ukraine grain exports deal to supply the MENA region
Grain shipments from Ukraine will resume after Russia agreed to rejoin an UN-backed initiative to allow exports via the Black Sea, ending a stand-off that threatened to reignite a global food crisis.
Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, had phoned his Turkish counterpart to say Moscow was back on board.
Many Middle East and African countries have been sympathetic to Moscow's arguments that sanctions — rather than the invasion of its neighbor Ukraine — are the main obstacle to grain exports.
The next shipments of grain would head to Somalia, Djibouti, and Sudan, Erdoğan said.
The Turkish leader, who has maintained close ties with Putin since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February, helped broker the original grain deal in July.
Read more on the Financial Times.
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About me
My name is Dario Sabaghi, a freelance journalist. I am interested in human rights and international news focusing on the MENA region.
Check out my work at dariosabaghi.com.
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Cover photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters - Deutsche Welle