The BBC and Guardian report that Israel has reopened two crossings with Gaza, a week after closing them due to a rocket attack. The BBC reports that the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing and the Erez transit point were reopened on Sunday morning. The past week has seen increased violence. Israel retaliated for the rocket attack by Palestinian militants in Gaza, and three Palestinians died in border protests. The reopening of the crossings came amid mediation efforts by Egypt. Restrictions on fishing off the coast of Hamas-ruled Gaza have also been lifted, the Times of Israel reports.

The Financial Times and the Independent report that clashes at the Gaza border on Saturday left several Palestinians dead, as thousands of Palestinians protested for the right of return to Israel. The Financial Times reports that Hamas, who has brought tens of thousands to the border with Israel most Fridays for a year, vowed to bring a million besieged Palestinians out to demand the right of refugees to return to ancestral lands inside Israel. The Israel Defence Forces said the actual number was 40,000, while Hamas claimed it was in the hundreds of thousands. With 11 days left to go before Israeli elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu built a wall of tanks along parts of the border, called up some reserves and beefed up the already formidable Southern Command with thousands of extra soldiers.  Israeli soldiers killed four and shot another 64, saying they were throwing explosive devices and trying to breach the border fence.

In the Telegraph, Mark Regev wrote on Saturday that: “Dismissing Hamas’ violence puts Israel’s democracy on par with a militant Islamist autocracy”. This week’s rocket attacks, Regev argued, are an apparent attempt by the Islamist autocrats to distract world attention from their brutal crackdown on popular dissatisfaction with their failing regime. He writes that it is only a pity for those Gazans protesting Hamas that the zealots behind today’s ‘Rally for Palestine’ prefer to shake hands with the terrorists and embrace their extremist narrative instead of shunning them. Regev concluded: “Perhaps more people ought to question if these activists really do care about the Palestinians, or just hate the Jewish state.”

Reuters reports that Brazil opened a new trade mission to Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, edging back from earlier signals it would follow the United States with a full embassy move to the contested city. The announcement came during a visit by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, an outspoken admirer of President Donald Trump, who broke global consensus by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and moving the US embassy there last May. “Brazil decided to create an office in Jerusalem to promote trade, investment, technology and innovation as a part of its embassy in Israel,” the Foreign Ministry in Brasilia said in a statement. Like most countries, Brazil has an embassy in Tel Aviv.

The Independent reports that leaders of major Middle Eastern countries were united in their condemnation of Trump administration policies which they say are biased towards Israel at the annual Arab League summit. However, they were divided on a host of other issues, including whether to readmit founding member Syria, at the meeting in Tunisia on Sunday. This year’s summit comes against a backdrop of ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, rival authorities in Libya and a lingering boycott of Qatar by four fellow league members. Algeria’s president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir skipped the meeting as they contended with mass protests against their long reigns. Representatives from the 22-member league – minus Syria – aim to jointly condemn Donald Trump’s recognition of Israeli control over the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war, and Trump’s decision last year to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The Telegraph reports that British spies are deliberately not interviewing British Islamic State suspects in Syria partly because of fears any contact could strengthen the detainees’ case for returning to the UK. The government is worried that any encounter between MI6 officers and British ISIS suspects risks giving the detainees a legal foothold which they could exploit to come back to Britain, UK officials said.  Britain’s intelligence agencies have also been dogged by years of lawsuits over their role in the treatment of suspected jihadists abroad, leading MI6 officers to maintain “a strategic distance” from UK detainees in Syria.

The Telegraph reports that a 20-year-old Coventry jihadist has been revealed as the first British Islamic State recruit to be executed by the terror group for spying. Mohammed Ismail went off the radar in Raqqa in late 2016, nearly two and a half years after he and two other Coventry recruits arrived in Syria. His fate was revealed when senior members of the terror group’s security apparatus told the Sunday Times that he was executed for revealing the location of another Brit, high-profile Islamic State recruiter Nasser Muthana. Fresh-faced Ismail, a fighter dubbed Osama bin Bieber by the international press, had been wounded in battle and was working as an IS police officer at the time.

In the Telegraph, Andy Critchlow writes: “Islamic State may be defeated but risks to Middle East oil remain”.

The BBC and Guardian report that an investigator for Amazon boss Jeff Bezos says that Saudi Arabia hacked Bezos’s phone and accessed his data. The BBC reports that Gavin de Becker was hired by Bezos to find out how his private messages had been leaked to the National Enquirer tabloid. De Becker linked the hack to the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Saudi Arabia has not yet commented on the allegation. Bezos owns the Washington Post. De Becker said he had handed his findings over to US federal officials. “Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information,” he wrote on the Daily Beast website.

The BBC reports that Pope Francis has visited Morocco on his latest trip to a predominantly Muslim state. He met migrants and Muslim leaders, and held a Mass for the country’s small Roman Catholic community. The Pope celebrated Mass in a sports centre in the Moroccan capital Rabat on Sunday. On Saturday the Pope met migrants when he visited a centre run by the Catholic humanitarian organisation Caritas. “The issue of migration will never be resolved by raising barriers,” he had said in a speech earlier.

The Financial Times, Telegraph and the Times report that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey suffered a rare electoral setback last night, losing big cities in local election results. The Financial Times reports that reports that Erdogan was struck a painful blow in nationwide local elections, as his ruling party lost control of the capital Ankara and a tense stand-off unfolded in Istanbul. Mansur Yavas, the opposition mayoral candidate, claimed victory in Ankara as voters turned on Erdogan amid a contraction in economic growth, runaway food prices and rising unemployment that followed last year’s currency crisis. Yavas had a comfortable 3.8 point lead over his rival, Mehmet Ozhaseki, with a 50.9 per cent share of the vote, according to the preliminary results. But the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) later said there had been widespread invalid votes and irregularities and that it would challenge the result. In Istanbul, ruling party candidate Binali Yildirim declared victory even as results published by the state-run Anadolu news agency showed only a 0.06 point gap between him and his rival with 92 per cent of votes counted.  Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition challenger, refused to concede, saying that his party’s own tally put him in the lead. He accused Anadolu of halting the process of updating results just as he was catching up with Mr Yildirim, saying that the dispute over the outcome would go down as a “bitter moment” in Turkey’s history.

The Guardian reports that according to leaked medical files that are understood to have been prepared for the country’s ruler, King Salman, political prisoners in Saudi Arabia are said to be suffering from malnutrition, cuts, bruises and burns. The reports seem to provide the first documented evidence from within the heart of the royal court that political prisoners are facing severe physical abuse, despite the government’s denials that men and women in custody are being tortured. The Guardian has been told the medical reports will be given to King Salman along with recommendations that are said to include a potential pardon for all the prisoners, or at least early release for those with serious health problems.

The Independent reports that according to his sister, a Saudi humanitarian worker has been under “enforced disappearance” for a year and has reportedly been subject to “severe torture” by the authorities.  Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, 35, was detained without reason in Riyadh in March 2018, Areej al-Sadhan said. Sadhan, who lives in the US, said her family had heard nothing from her brother since. Mr Sadhan, a graduate of Notre De Namur University in California, was detained without an arrest warrant at the Red Crescent offices where he worked, his sister said. She said he had not been granted access to a lawyer, all requests to visit him had been denied and the family still did not know why he had been jailed or if he had been charged. She added: “We have only heard from other detainees and they say he has been subjected to severe torture. We have heard from families of other detainees who have seen him in the prison that he might he die from torture.

In the Financial Times, Siemon Kerr writes: “Dubai fears the end of its ‘build it and they will come’ model”. Kerr asks if an economy fuelled by the vagaries of the property market will be able to reform itself.

The Guardian reports that the husband of the British charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has delivered a Mother’s Day card to the Iranian embassy in London to mark the third year she has spent the celebration in jail. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested with her 22-month-old daughter Gabriella on 3 April 2016 at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport as she prepared to board a plane back to the UK after visiting family. She was subsequently sentenced to five years in the city’s notorious Evin prison after being accused of spying, a charge she denies. Speaking outside the embassy, Richard Ratcliffe said: “We’ve come to deliver her a Mother’s Day card, because obviously we can’t do that in person, and to deliver 155 bunches of flowers, one for each week she has been held. “Flowers, partly because it’s a Mother’s Day tradition, also because that’s what people are given when they’ve been released from prison [in Iran].”

Yediot Ahronoth reports on a large network of fake twitter accounts supporting the Likud Campaign. The article reports on a study which found a network of fake Twitter accounts being used to amplify the Likud and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s talking points, and to attack political rivals, the media and, at times, the legal establishment. The report provides a detailed account of how the network operated, and points to signs of possible collusion with the Likud – though the article notes that no proven link to the party was found.

Maariv reports that former National Security Advisor Yossi Cohen (and currently Mossad Director) opposed selling sophisticated submarines to Egypt. Ben Caspit writes that the National Security Council under Cohen agreed at the time with the security establishment and the IDF’s position that Israel should oppose the sale. A former high-ranking security official told Maariv: “Cohen, who is closely associated with Netanyahu, was also opposed to the deal and thought that Israel should try to prevent it.” Yesterday Raviv Drucker of Channel 13 News interviewed Yoram Ben Zeev, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, who fiercely criticised Israel’s dealings with Germany, its approval of the sale of submarines and the submarine affair in general. That critique complemented the unusually harsh statements that were made by Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, former director of the Political-Security Staff in the Defence Ministry, who gave an interview to Kan Television.

Kan Radio News reports that Israeli sources confirmed relief measures to Palestinians in Gaza would be expanded today. Yesterday Israel reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing for goods and the Erez crossing, despite the missile fire from the Gaza Strip. Israel this week will permit the transfer of money from Qatar to Gaza, as agreed in the past between Israel and Hamas with Egyptian and Qatari mediation. In addition, Israel is considering enlarging the Qatari grant after the Qataris said they would increase the monthly payment to $40m.

Haaretz reports on a large-scale plan to rehabilitate Gaza after the elections. Amos Harel writes that the main issue on the agenda relates to the package of economic steps. Here the ideas will have to be combined with “the deal of the century” that the U.S. administration is meant to propose for the Israeli-Palestinian track. It seems like one of the ideas being considered is to take the plan’s Gaza appendix and implement it first. Many of the current proposals were raised more than two years ago, in what was dubbed the “Poly plan,” after former Israeli Coordinator of Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Yoav (“Poly”) Mordechai. At the time there was talk of injecting about $1.5 billion into Gaza, mostly from the Gulf States, but with American and European support. Among the proposals were: Establishing industrial zones for Palestinian labor in Egyptian Rafah; building solar farms along the Gaza border; the upgrading of the Gaza’s gas and electricity infrastructure with Israeli assistance; the construction of desalination plants; the construction of a short railway connecting the Erez checkpoint with northern Gaza City (which would allow swifter passage of goods through Ashdod Port), and possibly constructing a dock for the Palestinians at the El-Arish Port in Sinai. Now these ideas are back on the agenda.

Yossi Melman in Maariv writes that: “According to reports from the Palestinian side, an understanding was reached this time on a broader arrangement than “quiet will be met with quiet.” They reported that Israel had agreed once again to expand the fishing zone, to increase the passage of goods to the Gaza Strip and to permit Qatar to almost triple the sum it sends to Gaza from $15m to $40m.”

Haaretz and Israel Hayom report on the visit to Israel of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Prime Minister Netanyahu last night hosted Bolsonaro for dinner and praised him for his decision to open a trade office in Jerusalem. Netanyahu said he hoped that this was a first step towards opening a Brazilian embassy in the capital.