Gaza City

JERUSALEM -- Seizing key roads and military compounds, and forcing the surrender of hundreds of their Fatah rivals, Hamas gunmen armed with rifles, mortars and grenades made substantial progress yesterday toward their apparent goal of conquering the entire Gaza Strip. Such rapid military progress by the highly organized and disciplined Islamic militant group raises the question of what a definitive Hamas victory in Gaza would mean for the Palestinians, the Israelis and the Middle East as a whole.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Hamas forces blew up or captured three more security compounds yesterday from outgunned Fatah defenders who surrendered by the dozens as the militant Islamic movement expanded its control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas battered Fatah's four main compounds with mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons fire. Both Palestinian factions fired wildly from high-rise rooftops, and Hamas turned a mosque into a grenade-launching base. By late yesterday, Hamas controlled nearly all of the densely populated coastal territory outside this sprawling capital city.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Palestinians got their first chance to apply for travel along the soon-to-open "safe passage" route from Gaza to the West Bank yesterday, and by 1 p.m. more than 1,000 Gazans had elbowed and jostled their way into six local government offices to turn in the required forms.For some, it offered the chance of a lifetime. At the office on Nasser Street where applications were handed out, the crowd of mostly young men in their 20s and early 30s included many who had never seen the other half of what they hope will become a Palestinian state.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- From the flatlands of Rafah to the refugee camps of Gaza City, Palestinians let America's president know what was on their minds."

GAZA CITY, the Gaza Strip -- In the days of the Israeli occupation, the stone-throwing youths of the Palestinian uprising and the Israeli army forces turned this city's central square into a war zone. Today, white roses bloom in Palestine Square, Gazans rush to catch buses and Saber Jindia hangs American flags from his newly renovated coffee shop.President Clinton comes to Gaza today as part of his three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is the first visit by an American president to the Gaza Strip, the seat of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and its 4-year-old experiment in self-rule.

GAZA CITY -- In the dusty slums of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are turning on each other as the promises of peace sour, and again there is talk of a Palestinian civil war.Police under Yasser Arafat continued mass arrests yesterday in hopes of stopping attacks on Israelis by extremist Palestinians. Officials gave various figures for the number of arrests, ranging from 150 to 300."This time we're serious," said Nabil Abu-Rudinah, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.Leaders of an opposition group, the Islamic fundamentalists known as Hamas, warned that the crackdown could create an "explosion," and vowed that they will refuse a police ultimatum to give up their guns.

JERUSALEM -- Islamic militants accidentally blew up their workshop while making bombs in Gaza City yesterday, killing at least six people and wounding more than 30 others, Palestinian police said.Brig. Gen. Ghazi Jabali, chief of the Gaza City police, said that members of a military unit of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, were working in an elaborate "bomb factory" on the second floor of a three-story apartment building when they detonated explosives they were making.The blast destroyed the building, raining debris across a mile-wide area in the densely populated Sheik Radwan neighborhood and throwing the badly torn bodies of some victims 300 yards away.

GAZA CITY -- In the dusty slums of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians are turning on each other as the promises of peace sour, and again there is talk of a Palestinian civil war.Police under Yasser Arafat continued mass arrests yesterday in hopes of stopping attacks on Israelis by extremist Palestinians. Officials gave various figures for the number of arrests, ranging from 150 to 300."This time we're serious," said Nabil Abu-Rudinah, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.Leaders of an opposition group, the Islamic fundamentalists PTC known as Hamas, warned that the crackdown could create an "explosion," and vowed they will refuse a police ultimatum to give up their guns.

Gaza City, Gaza -- ONE OF THE first things the Palestinian father of one of Gaza's "suicide bombers" told me when I visited the dead boy's home here was how the Islamic Jihad visited the family the day after the boy's death."

GAZA CITY -- First reports emerging from the Palestinian Authority's closed trials of Islamic militants indicate that tribunals are handing down summary verdicts after short court proceedings, some no longer than a few minutes.In the last month, more than a dozen Palestinians have been sentenced in the authority's newly formed State Security Court to prison terms ranging from one year to life for crimes from possession of illegal weapons to inciting suicide attacks.The trials began April 10, a day after two suicide bombings in the Gaza Strip killed seven Israeli soldiers and an American college student.

JERUSALEM - Israeli leaders worked at home and abroad yesterday to reinforce a fragile cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and respond to international criticism of civilian casualties inflicted by Israel's 22-day offensive against Hamas militants who control the Palestinian enclave. Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, met in Brussels, Belgium, with European leaders about preventing arms smuggling into Gaza, and military officials in Tel Aviv said they were investigating complaints that Israeli forces ignored international restrictions on the use of phosphorus weapons during their attacks in Gaza.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - As residents of the Gaza Strip continued to sift through the rubble and mourn their dead, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon toured the seaside Palestinian enclave yesterday and declared himself "deeply grieved by what I have seen today." Ban entered Gaza from Israel in a convoy of armored vehicles. Speaking to reporters in front of the smoldering remains of a U.N. food warehouse set ablaze last week by an Israeli tank shell, a somber Ban said he had witnessed "heartbreaking" scenes of destruction.

On a day of action on military and diplomatic fronts, Israeli soldiers drove deep into Gaza City yesterday, killed two top Hamas leaders and incurred withering international criticism for shelling a United Nations compound full of provisions for refugees. Despite the assault, Hamas fighters managed to fire at least 26 rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel. A rocket seriously wounded a woman and a 7-year-old boy in Beersheva, about 26 miles from Gaza, and injured three others. But there were also signs that a cease-fire deal was within reach.

JERUSALEM - The military power of Hamas has been weakened and its political leadership is divided over plans for a possible cease-fire, but an Israeli intelligence official said yesterday that the radical group remains dangerous, with 15,000 fighters, tunnels and a sophisticated arsenal of rockets and anti-tank weapons. The senior official's assessment was delivered in a news briefing on a day when Israeli ground forces and Hamas guerrillas battled fiercely in a southeastern neighborhood of high-rise apartments in Gaza City.

JERUSALEM - Israeli troops stepped up attacks on Hamas fighters in the outskirts of Gaza City yesterday, as the death toll of Palestinians in recent fighting surpassed 900 and Hamas militants fired a new volley of rockets into southern Israel. On the 17th day since Israel launched its incursion into the Gaza Strip, the conflict appeared to be reaching a crucial threshold that could result in escalated combat or a negotiated resolution. In a televised statement from a hide-out presumed to be in Gaza, a top leader of the battered Hamas regime mixed defiance with language suggesting openness to diplomacy.

JERUSALEM - Israeli troops and tanks thrust into the Gaza Strip's densely populated capital from three directions yesterday, drawing Hamas fighters into fierce combat in an offensive expanded by a fresh deployment of army reservists. High-rise apartments shook, and smaller, targeted buildings crumbled in Gaza City under the force of Israeli artillery shelling and missiles fired from helicopters. Plumes of black smoke rose as Hamas fighters answered with mortars, automatic rifles and grenades.

Israeli aircraft pounded Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip yesterday and scattered leaflets warning of an escalation in attacks, but there was no sign that its forces had begun a major advance on the militant group's urban strongholds. A senior Hamas commander and seven members of a Palestinian family were among those killed on the 15th day of Israel's thundering assault, which also damaged a hospital. Palestinian militants fired 15 rockets into Israel, wounding three people. Diplomatic efforts to end the fighting sputtered as Egypt rebuffed a proposal to place international forces along its border to help prevent weapons-smuggling into Gaza.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Shells fired by Israeli forces hit a United Nations school yesterday, killing at least 30 Palestinians who had sought shelter there on a day when Israeli forces pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip and a Hamas rocket struck a town about 20 miles south of Tel Aviv. Street battles rumbled across the Palestinian enclave and bloodshed showed no signs of ebbing, despite renewed calls by Arab and European leaders for the U.N. Security Council to demand a cease-fire. International pressure on Israel intensified after Palestinian medical officials reported that 75 Gazans were killed yesterday as Israeli forces swept into more densely populated areas.

JERUSALEM - Israeli ground forces backed by air and naval power fought their way into urban areas deep inside the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip yesterday, striking at the Palestinian group's hide-outs and rocket-launching sites but also inflicting a heavy toll in civilian lives. Medical authorities in Gaza said 16 children were killed by airstrikes, naval shelling and artillery fire. Israel said it is aiming at Hamas' 15,000-member paramilitary force. Late in the day, Israeli troops entered densely populated areas just north and east of Gaza City, the territorial capital.

JERUSALEM - Thousands of Israeli soldiers supported by helicopter gunships and columns of tanks bisected the Gaza Strip yesterday, isolating its largest city amid fierce clashes on multiple fronts with militant fighters. At least 35 Palestinians died in confrontations with Israeli troops and from missile strikes and artillery barrages, according to local medical sources. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed since Dec. 27, when Israel began its current campaign against Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza.