Houses searched as city sealed
Israeli soldiers sealed off this city on Sunday, placed its densely populated center under curfew and conducted house-to-house searches for Palestinian militants in the largest military operation in the West Bank in months.
Israeli officials said the raid was crucial to stopping future militant attacks against Israel, but Palestinian officials said the offensive threatened nascent efforts to restart the peace process.
It was the first large-scale operation in the West Bank since Israeli forces entered Nablus last July and surrounded a security compound to arrest suspected militants.
The operation was focused on Nablus’ Old City, or casbah, a densely-populated area of narrow alleyways, apartment buildings and markets. About 50,000 people were placed under curfew, residents said.
TEHRAN, Iran
Ahmadinejad remains defiant
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday his country’s disputed nuclear program was like a train without brakes or a reverse gear, prompting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to respond that Iran needs “a stop button.”
The comments came as senior officials of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – Britain, the U.S., France, China and Russia – and Germany prepared for an emergency summit in London on Monday to discuss increased international pressure on Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
“The train of the Iranian nation is without brakes and a rear gear,” state radio quoted Ahmadinejad as telling a gathering of Islamic clerics. “We dismantled the rear gear and brakes of the train and threw them away sometime ago.”
Rice responded by saying “they don’t need a reverse gear. They need a stop button.” She also told “Fox News Sunday” that Tehran needs “to stop enriching and reprocessing, and then we can sit down and talk about whatever is on Iran’s mind.”
NAIROBI, Kenya
Ship delivering U.N. food hijacked
Pirates hijacked a cargo ship delivering U.N. food aid to northeastern Somalia on Sunday – at least the third time since 2005 that a vessel contracted to the United Nations has been hijacked off the country’s dangerous coast.
The ship, MV Rozen, had just dropped off more than 1,800 tons of food aid in the semiautonomous region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia when the pirates struck, said Stephanie Savariaud, a spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Program.
It was not immediately known if any of the 12 crew members aboard – six from Sri Lanka and six from Kenya – were injured in the attack.
The ship was contracted by the WFP to deliver food aid to Somalia, where around one million people are suffering from a drought that hit the region last year.
The 1,880-mile coast of Somalia, which has had no effective government since warlords ousted a dictatorship in 1991 and then turned on each other, has emerged as one of the most dangerous areas for ships.