Covid-19 infections in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza have more than doubled over the last few days, rising from 20 to 55.
The new cases were discovered among Gaza residents who recently returned from Egypt or Israel, and the Hamas authorities have responded by announcing that no one else...
Blog archive: All
-
22nd May 2020
-
21st May 2020Faced with a shortage of places for quarantining Egyptians who return from abroad, the authorities have adopted an original – if dangerous – solution. To create more space, they have reduced the mandatory quarantine period from 14 days to seven. Egyptian citizens who test negative for Covid-...
-
20th May 2020Kuwait has assigned its National Guard to take over the running of supermarkets where staff have been struck down by the Covid-19 coronavirus. One of those placed under military operation and management is the Khaldiya Cooperative Society which closed its doors ten days ago following the...
-
19th May 2020By May 6, Jordan had gone ten days without any Covid-19 infections coming to light inside the country. Since then, though, there have been 166 new cases – more half of them linked to a single truck driver in Mafraq province. After returning from Saudi Arabia the driver was sent into home...
-
18th May 2020The wealthy Gulf state of Qatar – home to al-Jazeera television and controversial host for the 2022 World Cup – is offering to help the United States and other countries overcome the coronavirus crisis. That is the main story today on the front page of Qatar's The Peninsula newspaper. The...
-
17th May 2020Many people are dying in the Yemen's southern city of Aden and no one is quite sure why. Maybe it's coronavirus but it could be dengue fever, chikungunya, ebola, malaria, pneumonic plague or something else, according to the head of the National Emergency Committee. More than 500 deaths have been...
-
16th May 2020Coronavirus infections in Iran are increasing again and the country's epidemic looks to be heading for a second wave. The first wave peaked at the end of March when the daily count of new cases briefly rose above 3,000. Throughout the following month new cases dropped steadily, reaching a...
-
15th May 2020Unidentified militiamen entered the intensive care unit at al-Jala hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi on Sunday and opened fire. Medical staff escaped with their lives but seven respirators were badly damaged, along with an ultrasound machine and several monitors. In Libya's internal...
-
14th May 2020Every day this month Saudi Arabia has reported more new Covid-19 infections than any other country in the Middle East. A further 1,905 cases were confirmed yesterday and the cumulative total since the virus first arrived in the kingdom is frighteningly large – just under 45,000. There are tentative...
-
13th May 2020Considering Lebanon's political and economic chaos its efforts to control the spread of Covid-19 infections have been surprisingly effective. Eleven weeks after the virus first arrived in the country there have been only 870 confirmed cases among a population of almost seven million. Lebanon...
-
12th May 2020Yesterday, for the first time since March 8, Tunisia reported no new cases of Covid-19. This is just one of several hopeful signs that the virus is receding. Official figures show the recovery rate is now higher than the infection rate, and the number of currently-active cases has more than...
-
11th May 2020Kuwait has been placed under a round-the-clock curfew following the discovery of a major Covid-19 outbreak among employees at supermarkets. One large Kuwaiti chain, the Khaldya Cooperative Society, shut its doors until further notice after 103 workers – about 40% of its total staff – tested...
