JERUSALEM: Israeli police arrested two prominent Palestinian cultural leaders on Wednesday at their home in east Jerusalem on a suspicion of “funding terrorism,” their lawyer and police said.
Rania Elias, who heads the Yabous Cultural Center and her husband Suhail Khoury, Director General of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, were detained at their home in Jerusalem’s Beit Hanina neighborhood.
The Yabous center and the conservatory were also raided by police and Israeli tax investigators, with documents confiscated.
The Palestine Liberation Organization condemned the arrests and raids as part of “Israel’s violent and systematic campaign against Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem.”
According to Elias’s lawyer Nasir Odeh, the couple was “detained on charges of financing terrorist organizations.”
But he stressed that Israel’s broad anti-terrorism laws include a wide range of offenses, including accepting money from organizations that the Jewish state has labelled as “terrorist.”
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said in a statement that police, with tax authorities, detained “three suspects... in connection with tax evasion and fraud,” without mentioning the individuals by name.
It confirmed the searches “at two organizations that were run in east Jerusalem claiming that they were involved in Palestinian culture.”
Rosenfeld said the individuals were being questioned and the investigation was ongoing.
His statement makes no mention of terror-related offenses.
But Odeh sent AFP documents given to his client by police ahead of their detention, which indicate they were “under suspicion of money laundering (and) funding terror.”
The Yabous Cultural Center in east Jerusalem was established in the mid 1990s with a mandate to celebrate Palestinian culture and Arab heritage in the city.
The conservatory, named after the late Palestinian intellectual Said, has branches in Jerusalem and across the occupied West Bank.
Its mandate is to promote music and music education among Palestinian communities.
Israel occupied east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community.
It considers the entire city its capital, while the Palestinians see the eastern sector as the capital of their future state.
Israel arrests Palestinian cultural leaders, raids centers
https://arab.news/c7c5t
Israel arrests Palestinian cultural leaders, raids centers
- Rania Elias and her husband Suhail Khoury were detained at their home in Jerusalem
- The couple was “detained on charges of financing terrorist organizations”
Ankara city hall says water cuts due to ‘record drought’
- Dam reservoir levels have dropped to 1.12 percent and taps are being shut off for several hours a day in certain districts on a rotating schedule in Ankara
ANKARA: Water cuts for the past several weeks in Turkiye’s capital were due to the worst drought in 50 years and an exploding population, a municipal official told AFP, rejecting accusations of mismanagement.
Dam reservoir levels have dropped to 1.12 percent and taps are being shut off for several hours a day in certain districts on a rotating schedule in Ankara, forcing many residents to line up at public fountains to fill pitchers.
“2025 was a record year in terms of drought. The amount of water feeding the dams fell to historically low levels, to 182 million cubic meters in 2025, compared with 400 to 600 million cubic meters in previous years. This is the driest period in the last 50 years,” said Memduh Akcay, director general of the Ankara municipal water authority.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called the Ankara municipal authorities, led by the main opposition party, “incompetent.”
Rejecting this criticism, the city hall says Ankara is suffering from the effects of climate change and a growing population, which has doubled since the 1990s to nearly six million inhabitants.
“In addition to reduced precipitation, the irregularity of rainfall patterns, the decline in snowfall, and the rapid conversion of precipitation into runoff (due to urbanization) prevent the dams from refilling effectively,” Akcay said.
A new pumping system drawing water from below the required level in dams will ensure no water cuts this weekend, Ankara’s city hall said, but added that the problem would persist in the absence of sufficient rainfall.
Much of Turkiye experienced a historic drought in 2025. The municipality of Izmir, the country’s third-largest city on the Aegean coast, has imposed daily water cuts since last summer.
