BEIRUT: Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun on Friday reaffirmed his country’s position on the Palestinian cause during a meeting with Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the political bureau of Hamas.

Aoun expressed “the right of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on all their national territory, with Jerusalem as its capital,” and stressed Palestinian refugees’ right to return home.

JEDDAH: Security chiefs in Tunisia have uncovered plots to assassinate President Kais Saied amid concerns over a growing political crisis, they said on Friday.

The threats were revealed as an attacker previously jailed on terrorism charges and released in 2021 tried to stab two police officers guarding a synagogue in the center of Tunis.

“According to credible information and investigations still underway, the president of the republic and the presidency as an institution are the target of serious threats,” Interior Ministry spokeswoman Fadhila Khelifi said.

ANKARA: Firefighting crews battle for a third day on Thursday a wind-driven wildfire that has blackened swaths of pine forest near a popular resort in southwestern Turkey and driven dozens of people from their homes.

More than 2,500 firefighters, aided by water-dropping planes and helicopters, were deployed to fight the blaze that erupted on Tuesday in the Bordubet region, near Marmaris on the Aegean Sea coast. The blaze spread rapidly, fanned by winds.

TUNIS: The head of Tunisia’s powerful UGTT trade union confederation on Thursday rejected conditions set by the International Monetary Fund for a new loan to bail out the country’s struggling economy.

“We reject the conditions set by the IMF, given Tunisians’ low salaries, lack of means, rising poverty and unemployment,” Noureddine Taboubi told reporters.

The global lender has called for “ambitious reforms” to tackle the heavily indebted country’s public finances and reform its state-owned companies.

BEIRUT: Videos circulated by activists on social media on Wednesday showed a young man beating Lebanese and Syrian workers employed to pick cherries on his land in Majdel Akoura, northern Lebanon.

The shocking footage also showed evidence of torture on the bodies of the young men, who were filmed as they pleaded for mercy.

The families of the abused men from nearby poverty-stricken villages said that the employer accused the workers of stealing money, a wristwatch and sunglasses after four days of working for him so he could get away with not paying their wages.