Gaza Strip

JERUSALEM - Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinians were killed in an exchange of fire along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip on Friday after an Israeli army patrol spotted Palestinians planting explosives along the border, the army said. The Israeli deaths were the first military casualties since shortly after Israel completed a three-week military offensive in the Gaza Strip in January 2009 that aimed to stop the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel. Two other soldiers were wounded in Friday's incident.

James W. Dale makes a welcome point in his commentary about the divestment campaign against Israel ("Choosing to stay engaged: Anti-Israel measures like divestment are not the best way to seek justice for Palestinians," May 4). It is, as he says, vital that mainline churches, including his own Presbyterian Church, understand that anti-Israel "divestment" campaigns render their proponents destructive and deny them a voice at the table. "Divestment" echoes both the Nazi boycott and impoverishment of German Jews and the Arab League's economic boycott of Israel.

Protests exploded across the Gaza Strip yesterday in an angry backlash over the Israeli army's killing of a militia commander of the radical Islamic Resistance Movement.In the occupied territory's worst violence since Israel signed an agreement with the PLO on self-government for the region, thousands of Palestinian youths pelted soldiers with stones, and more than 30 Palestinians were wounded when the soldiers fired on the rioters. Page 6A

Consider these two comments if you want to know who is our ally and who is our enemy. Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip and regularly fires rockets into neighboring Israel, has condemned the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden and said it "mourned him as an Arab holy warrior," according to news reports. "We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood," said Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas in Gaza. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the U.S. operation a "resounding victory for justice, freedom and the values shared by all democratic countries fighting shoulder to shoulder against terror.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- A group of 22 donor nations and three international agencies completed two days of intense negotiations yesterday, agreeing to an injection of more than $200 million into the strife-torn Gaza Strip over the next four months to meet Yasser Arafat's emergency financing needs.Donor nations committed $125 million in grants to enable the Palestinian Authority to pay public workers through March; create several thousand construction jobs for its vast numbers of unemployed; and begin projects to improve roads, sewer and electrical systems.

ISRAELI-OCCUPIED GAZA STRIP -- This is a place of infinite misery.Even the land seems to give up hope as it passes under the gun barrels of wary soldiers at the gate: The lush farmland surrenders to dust that grows only poverty and despair.Violence, however, flourishes.Four persons were killed and an estimated 70 others wounded Wednesday when an Israeli military patrol chased a car from a observation post that had been hit by a grenade into a crowded Arab market. Met with a rain of stones and firebombs, the soldiers answered with automatic weapons.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert defended his government's handling of the conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying yesterday that the offensive would continue until Palestinian militants free a captured soldier and stop firing rockets into Israel. He again ruled out a prisoner swap with Hamas to win the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was seized by militants June 25 during a cross-border raid. "I will not negotiate with Hamas," Olmert told foreign journalists during a session that focused on Israel's two-week-old Gaza incursion.

EREZ CHECKPOINT, Gaza Strip -- Radical Muslims shot and killed two Israeli soldiers at the entrance to the Gaza Strip yesterday, putting to test the newly arrived Palestinian police.It remains unclear if the police, who took control in the Gaza Strip Wednesday, will try to find and arrest the assailants.Israel says they must do that under terms of their peace agreement. But such a move would alienate many Palestinians who still feel that attacks on Israel are justified."We shall take the necessary measures," the new police chief, Maj. Gen. Nasser Yusef, said cryptically.

Events in Jerusalem and the West Bank over the past several weeks add an unsought urgency to James Longley's documentary Gaza Strip that makes it required viewing for anyone looking to understand not the whys behind the Middle East turmoil, but the hows. Longley, filming in Gaza during spring 2001, watches as Palestinians living in Gaza City and the Khan Younis refugee camp go about the business of living in a world where machine-gun fire is normal background noise and the number of friends you've buried may be greater than the number who are still around.

JERUSALEM -- Israel made its first military incursion deep into the Gaza Strip since withdrawing from the territory nine months ago, sending special forces backed by a helicopter gunship to ambush a squad of rocket-firing Palestinian militants yesterday. Four Palestinians were killed and about six others wounded in an intense pre-dawn exchange of fire that lasted more than an hour and occurred nearly two miles inside Gaza. At least three of those killed were members of a cell from the militant group Islamic Jihad, the Israeli army and Palestinian medical officials said.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict underwent another evolution this week when the Fatah-backed Palestinian National Authority, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that rules the Gaza Strip, announced they would put aside their differences to make common cause for an independent Palestinian state. Whether the two groups can really end years of mutual enmity and distrust remains to be seen, but the mere fact that they are talking about cooperating again could spell trouble for U.S. diplomacy in the region.

Commentary writer Laila El-Haddad feels "betrayed" by Judge Richard Goldstone's repudiation of the central allegation of the U.N.'s Goldstone commission investigation. Turns out the Israelis, as they said all along, did not intentionally target Palestinian civilians during the anti-terrorist Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. El-Haddad quotes her father, from Gaza City, saying Israeli forces "destroyed everything living and beautiful and ordinary," and cites the displacement of "more than 50,000 people" to prove it. The population of the Gaza Strip is about 1.4 million.

In what is at least his 27th anti-Israel letter in the past six years, Ray Gordon ("U.S. should cut Israel off," December 17) erroneously charges: • "Israel doesn't want a peace settlement with the Palestinians, today or ever. " In that case, why did Israel propose a West Bank and Gaza Strip state, with eastern Jerusalem as its capital, to Palestinian leadership in 2008, 2001 and 2000 — only to be rejected, with no counter-offer each time, and with violence on the earlier two occasions?

About 75 demonstrators waved Israeli flags at a downtown Baltimore intersection Friday in a show of support for this week's deadly attack by Israeli defense forces trying to prevent an aid flotilla from reaching the impoverished Gaza Strip. The 90-minute rally, organized by Baltimore Zionist District, was held at Pratt and Light streets to raise awareness of what supporters called an act of self-defense by Israel against Hamas, the militant Palestinian movement that controls Gaza.

Amid all the falsehoods and distortions in Laila El Haddad's diatribe against Israel lies a great truth: the situation in Gaza is tragic. It is tragic that after Israel acceded to international demands to "end the occupation" and forcibly evacuated thousands of Jews from their homes in Gaza, the people of Gaza decided not to use the infrastructure abandoned by the Israelis and the billions of dollars of foreign aid poured into the region as...

A Maryland peace activist aboard the pro-Palestinian flotilla raided by Israeli commandos expressed guarded optimism Wednesday that the deadly episode would force Israel to relax its years-old blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government "may have made a gross mistake," Edward L. Peck, a retired U.S. diplomat who lives in Chevy Chase, said in a telephone interview. "And so, this could lead to an improved situation for the people" of Gaza. "It's a horrible thing that happened to those Turks who died" in the Israeli attack.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip -- The long and tortured peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians came down to this yesterday: Palestinian officers, in green uniforms, posted with their Kalashnikov rifles on the watchtowers of a former Israeli army post.And this: Fayeh Abu-Aweymer, 61, surrounded and overwhelmed by youngsters who were not yet born when he left his homeland in 1967, crying openly as he sat in a shop on the first day of his return.And this: Hundreds of Palestinian boys crawling up and over the walls of a military camp that for as long as they could remember has been the target of their stones.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli forces killed eight people in separate operations in the Gaza Strip yesterday, Palestinian officials said, as militants fired several rockets into southern Israel. Six people were killed in the southern Gaza Strip during an Israeli operation early in the day near the town of Khan Yunis. At least three were identified as fighters belonging to the military wing of Hamas. The others were bystanders, including a father and 13-year-old son from the same extended family as the militants, neighbors said.

Early Monday, Israeli navy commandos attacked a flotilla of humanitarian aid destined for the occupied Gaza Strip in international waters. The ships were carrying 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies that are banned from Gaza under Israel's directives, including toys, wheelchairs, athletic equipment and medicines. The multinational aid convoy to Gaza included a former U.S. ambassador, a U.S. Navy veteran and 10 other U.S. citizens. The Memorial Day massacre left nine people dead and dozens more injured.

JERUSALEM - Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinians were killed in an exchange of fire along Israel's border with the Gaza Strip on Friday after an Israeli army patrol spotted Palestinians planting explosives along the border, the army said. The Israeli deaths were the first military casualties since shortly after Israel completed a three-week military offensive in the Gaza Strip in January 2009 that aimed to stop the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel. Two other soldiers were wounded in Friday's incident.