Here’s a round-up of Al Jazeera’s Middle East coverage this week.
A Palestinian family mourning their seven-year-old child, Iran’s supreme leader speaks for the first time on the protests in the country, and an Istanbul district where tensions between Syrians and Turks has come out into the open. Here’s your round-up, written by Abubakr Al-Shamahi, Al Jazeera Digital’s Middle East and North Africa editor.
His father described him as a “dream”, just seven years old. The photograph of Rayan Suleiman, shared by his family, shows a wide-eyed boy with an innocent gaze. It was starkly juxtaposed by the way he died, literally frightened to death, the family said, as he ran home from school, chased by Israeli soldiers.
The boy’s shocking death – one doctor said the child’s heart just quit under a surge of adrenaline – has once again drawn attention to the routine arrests of Palestinian children by heavily armed Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli army has described Rayan’s death as a tragedy, but denied any responsibility.
The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has finally broken his silence on widespread protests over the past three weeks. The demonstrators are angry over the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, the suspected role played by the so-called morality police, and the laws that restrict the way women can dress. Khamenei’s response: he dismissed the protests as riots, and blamed Israel and the United States.
[READ: French actors cut their hair in solidarity with protesters in Iran]
Khamenei also emphasised his support for the security forces. While the majority of those killed since authorities started cracking down on the demonstrations have been protesters, police personnel and pro-government militiamen have also died. And state media reported that an attack by separatists in the remote eastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan killed 19 people, including four members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In the last decade, Turkey has become a refuge for 3.7 million Syrians fleeing their country’s devastating war. But over the years xenophobic attacks on Syrians have increased. It’s especially been the case in working-class areas of big cities like Istanbul. You have Turks who are worried about their own economic situation, which is bad, and at the same time…