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ISRAEL

France and Israel call for tougher sanctions on Iran

Sanctions on Iran over its contested nuclear programme need to be strengthened further, French President Francois Hollande and his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres said on Friday.

France and Israel call for tougher sanctions on Iran
French President François HOllande embraces his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres in Paris on Friday. Photo Bertrand Guay/AFP

Western powers suspect Iran's nuclear programme to be a cover for building an atomic weapons capability, a charge which Tehran strongly denies.

"I have said how much we want the sanctions to be beefed up, which are already efficient," Hollande said after meeting Peres.

Iran last month held talks with the five UN Security Council permanent members – the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France – plus Germany on its nuclear ambitions in the Kazakh capital Almaty.

The meeting saw the group offer Iran a softening of non-oil or financial sector-related sanctions in exchange for concessions over the country's uranium enrichment operations.

"The sanctions are effective more than we thought but not enough… and I was very glad to hear from the president (Hollande) that he plans to take more measures because if we can end this danger without military use, it will be better," Peres said.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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