CAIRO: Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi has announced the postponement of the tripartite summit between Iraq, Egypt and Jordan due to the Sohag train accident.
The prime minister expressed, through his official Twitter account, his country’s solidarity with Egypt and the families of the victims of Friday’s train collision in Sohag Governorate in Upper Egypt. The accident resulted in the death of 32 people and the injury of others.
“Our thoughts are with the families of the victims and we wish the injured a speedy recovery. In solidarity, we will postpone the trilateral summit to the near future,” he said.
The Jordanian-Egyptian-Iraqi summit was due to be held in Baghdad at the end of this month, in the presence of Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry revealed that consultations between the foreign ministers of the three countries have begun to set a new date for holding joint meetings — on the sidelines of the tripartite summit — soon.
“As we renew our condolences to the government and people of the Arab Republic of Egypt, for this painful tragedy, we note that a tripartite meeting was proposed to take place between the foreign ministers of these countries,” the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, in tweets on its official Twitter account.
A meeting was scheduled to take place between the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Fuad Hussein, and his Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts, Sameh Shoukry, and Ayman Safadi.
Tripartite summit between Egypt, Iraq and Jordan postponed due to train accident
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Tripartite summit between Egypt, Iraq and Jordan postponed due to train accident
- The Jordanian-Egyptian-Iraqi summit was due to be held in Baghdad at the end of this month
- Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi were due to attend
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
