Gaza Strip

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Within hours of the Israeli army's predawn withdrawal from the Gaza Strip yesterday, Hamas was declaring victory in its latest round of armed conflict with the Jewish state. To punctuate their point, more than a dozen rockets were launched at nearby Israeli towns. The message: The two-day Israeli tank incursion that killed more than 60 Palestinians had failed to cripple the rocket-launching capability of Gaza's militants. "If you are asking, `Did this single incursion solve the problem?

JERUSALEM -- Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas suspended peace talks with Israel yesterday amid growing international criticism of the Jewish state's incursion into the Gaza Strip. Mounting casualties in Gaza drew protests from European and Arab capitals and sent thousands of Palestinians into the streets across the West Bank, where Israeli troops killed a teenager during a demonstration. The spike in violence during the past five days is a setback for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had hoped during her visit here this week to advance peace talks that President Bush helped launch in November with the aim of an accord on Palestinian statehood by the end of his term.

Rocket fire into southern Israel and Israel's retaliatory attacks into the Gaza Strip are escalating into something perilously close to a border war. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is expected in the region next week, has demanded an end to the unprovoked Hamas rocket fire. But unless an effort is made to broker a cease-fire, the violence will overshadow her trip and squelch any reason to talk about a peace deal. The Palestinian architects of this mayhem predictably have scored a tactical win: They have succeeded in intensifying the scope of Israel's military involvement - at the expense of their own people - and underscored the inability of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to do anything about it. And while Israel's strategic airstrikes have resulted in the deaths of at least a dozen militants and destroyed the office of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Palestinian civilians, including children, have been killed as well.

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip -- As Israelis watched nervously from across the border, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip staged protests last night against the Jewish state, placing a few thousand placard-waving demonstrators along the main highway. Five rockets were also fired into Israel, one of them injuring a 10-year-old boy in the town of Sederot as an air-raid siren sent him and his 8-year-old sister, who were playing near their home, rushing for cover against a wall. He underwent surgery for severe shrapnel wounds in his right shoulder.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli attacks killed nine Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip yesterday after the Islamic group claimed responsibility for its first suicide bombing in Israel in more than three years. Hamas' statement of "full responsibility" for Monday's bombing in the southern desert town of Dimona, which killed a 73-year- old Israeli woman, and the deadly Israeli response raised the likelihood of escalating conflict in the days ahead. Seven of the militants were killed in an airstrike on a police station near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.

JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian blew himself up yesterday in a desert town near Israel's nuclear reactor, killing a woman and wounding 11 other people in the first suicide attack in Israel in just over a year. Police prevented a second blast at the same shopping center in Dimona by fatally shooting another attacker as he reached for his explosives-laden belt. The violence was the latest to sour the climate for U.S.-backed peace talks since they were revived in December after a seven-year hiatus.

JERUSALEM -- Israel's Supreme Court rejected yesterday an appeal to block Israel from sharply reducing supplies of fuel and electricity to the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government had argued that the fuel it allowed through met the basic humanitarian needs of Gaza's population while exacting a widely felt price among ordinary Gazans for the continual firing of rockets and mortars into Israel by Palestinian militants. Israel hopes that such a policy will create popular pressure to force the Hamas rulers of Gaza and other militant groups to stop the rocket fire.

JERUSALEM -- Egypt tried to close its breached border with the Gaza Strip yesterday, but Hamas militants bulldozed a new opening in a border wall, and riot police failed to stem the flow of thousands of Palestinians into Egyptian territory. The border breach at Rafah, in defiance of a tightened Israeli blockade imposed on Gaza in response to rocket attacks, is becoming a growing challenge to the Egyptian government. It does not want to be seen as aiding the Israelis in sealing off Gaza, but it also fears a spillover of Islamist influence from the Hamas-ruled territory.

JERUSALEM -- Israel closed all border crossings with the Gaza Strip yesterday, cutting off at least one aid shipment, and bombed the empty Interior Ministry building of the Palestinian Authority, which was already a ruin from a previous Israeli bombing. Israel said it was acting to try to halt Palestinian rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza, while Hamas and other Palestinian militants said they had increased their rocket fire in retaliation against intensified Israeli raids. In the bombing of the empty ministry building, which is in the crowded Al-Rimal neighborhood of western Gaza City, one woman, Haniah Abd-el Jawad, 52, was killed and up to 46 people were injured by blast and shrapnel, some of them children, according to medical officials at Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a Katyusha rocket 10 1/2 miles into Israel yesterday, their deepest artillery strike yet, provoking some of the heaviest Israeli assaults in months. Nine Palestinians were killed in the day's fighting. The rocket landed harmlessly north of the coastal city of Ashkelon. An Israeli tank and helicopter offensive that was already under way in Gaza quickly intensified, targeting suspected arms depots and the homes and hide-outs of militants, who fired back with grenade launchers and automatic rifles.