Hamas

Jerusalem - Declaring Hamas "badly beaten," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a unilateral halt to Israel's punishing offensive in the Gaza Strip starting yesterday. But he said Israeli forces will stay in the Palestinian territory for now, and Hamas threatened to keep fighting until they leave. Israel's decision, which took effect at 2 a.m., could bring relief to the battered coastal enclave after 22 days of airstrikes and a thundering ground offensive that killed more than 1,200 people and reduced entire residential city blocks to rubble.

Andrew Wyeth will rank among great realists Thank you for the fair and balanced article on the late painter Andrew Wyeth ("Painter Andrew Wyeth dies at 91 in Pa. home," Jan. 17). Great art is often polarizing, and this can certainly be said of Mr. Wyeth's work. But as a professional artist, I can say that his paintings have had a profound effect on my work since my father took me to see his one-man exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1966. When I was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the early 1970s, I was belittled in front of the class by a drawing teacher because I said Mr. Wyeth was a great painter.

In the West, there's a huge sense of relief. The Hamas-led government that has been causing everyone so much trouble has been isolated in Gaza, and a new government has been appointed in the West Bank by the "moderate," peace-loving Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. So why, then, do Palestinians not share in the relief? Well, for one thing, the old government had been democratically elected; now it has been dismissed out of hand by presidential fiat. There's also the fact that the new prime minister appointed by Mr. Abbas - Salam Fayyad - has the support of the West, but his election list won only 2 percent of the votes in the same election that swept Hamas to victory.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- At least six Palestinians were killed and more than a hundred wounded yesterday when a mass rally marking the third anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, ended in armed clashes between the rival factions of Hamas and Fatah. All of the dead and most of the wounded were Fatah supporters who had been taking part in the rally, according to doctors at two Gaza hospitals. Tens of thousands of Gaza residents had turned out to honor Arafat, the founder of the Fatah movement, in the largest show of support for the mainstream Palestinian organization since the Islamic group Hamas seized control of the territory last June.

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.

JERUSALEM -- Leaders of rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas will meet today in a new venue, but they confront the same obstacles to a power-sharing arrangement that have torpedoed past negotiations. The two sides gather in the Muslim holy city of Mecca in what could be a final attempt to form a unity government aimed at ending their yearlong power struggle and breaking the Western aid embargo imposed after Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006. Stakes are high. The talks come after a new spate of factional clashes in the Gaza Strip that left more than two dozen Palestinians dead and dimmed hopes of resolving the deadlock through peaceful negotiations.

JERUSALEM -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak condemned yesterday the recent Hamas takeover of Gaza as a coup that threatens the future of a single Palestinian state. Speaking before lawmakers in Cairo, Egypt, Mubarak said Egypt supports Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Fatah party, whose Gaza security forces were routed by Hamas nearly two weeks ago. The split has left a battered political landscape in which the Islamist-backed Hamas controls Gaza and the moderate Fatah reigns over the West Bank.

JERUSALEM -- Israel declared the Hamas-run Gaza Strip to be "hostile territory" yesterday, setting the stage for possible cutoffs of fuel and electricity, and overshadowing a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to prepare for a November peace conference. Israel did not say when it might cut the flow of power or fuel to the impoverished coastal enclave. A statement from the office of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said his government would study the legal ramifications before imposing such sanctions and seek to avoid a humanitarian crisis.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- The Palestinian interior minister quit in frustration yesterday over a surge in factional violence in Gaza that has cast the future of the Palestinian power-sharing government into doubt. After barely more than a month on the job, Hani Kawasmeh said he was stepping down because neither side of the factional divide, Fatah or Hamas, would give him the power necessary to integrate competing security agencies into a unified force capable of establishing order in the Gaza Strip.

The last Middle East envoy resigned the post after about a year. Once the Islamic militant group Hamas swept the Palestinian elections in January 2006 and mediator James Wolfensohn's United States-led sponsors blocked all aid to the Palestinian Authority, the former World Bank president saw little hope of reviving Palestinian society as it became more impoverished, and he saw no chance to forge a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians....

Where I live, optimism is often treated as a certifiable condition. But a recent meeting with Hamas leaders gives me hope for the future. Long cast (sometimes with good reason) as narrow-minded and doctrinaire, the elected government of Gaza has begun to emerge from its bunker mentality and engage with the outside world. Israeli military strategists take credit for the shift. They want us to believe that last winter's massive attack, which left nearly 1,500 dead and caused billions of dollars in damage, broke the Islamic movement's will to resist.

Reports of alleged misconduct by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza war are a sad postscript to the combat mission launched to stop rocket fire by Hamas militants into Israel, which continues today. The expos? of soldier testimonies was published last week in two of Israel's main newspapers. It raises anew questions about Israel's conduct in Gaza and its impact on civilian casualties. Israeli military leaders have launched a probe into the reports. It should spare no one to get to the truth. That's the best way for the Israeli government to determine whether the reports reflect the improper actions of a few wayward soldiers or widespread callousness prompted by lax rules of engagement, as the soldier testimonies suggest.

JERUSALEM -The split screen seemed to capture Israel's mood of frustration over its setbacks in recent years. On one side, television viewers saw the somber face of Ehud Olmert as he addressed them yesterday evening for perhaps the last time as prime minister. His message: Marathon efforts to win the release of a captured soldier had failed. The other side showed the soldier's dejected parents as they listened from a tent outside Olmert's residence. The tent had been pitched by advocates of a prisoner exchange with the soldier's Palestinian captors, amid high expectations of a deal before the Israeli leader leaves office in the coming days.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a U.S.-trained economist who gained international respect and hefty aid donations for the Palestinian cause, said yesterday that he will step down in a move aimed at reviving a power-sharing deal with the militant group Hamas. The shake-up is part of evolving leadership changes on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that could complicate President Barack Obama's search for peace in the region. In Israel, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu is working to form a coalition government of right-wing parties that gained a majority in the parliament elected last month.

Will aid to Gaza mean more bombs? I am totally baffled by the Obama administration's pledge of $900 million to aid Hamas and the Palestinians after Israel's justified retaliation for the months and months of senseless attacks on southern Israel from Gaza ("U.S. aid tilts toward W. Bank," March 2). When the United Nations was providing aid to Gaza during and following Israel's strikes, it was widely reported that Hamas officials were intercepting aid meant for civilian victims and not permitting them to receive the assistance they so desperately needed.

In her first visit to the Middle East as the United State's chief diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finds herself in the same position as her recent predecessors. She is defending Israel's right to protect itself against Hamas-launched rocket attacks and offering financial aid to Palestinians under the condition that it won't fall into the "wrong hands," a reference to the Islamic militants in control of the bomb-ravaged Gaza Strip. The intended beneficiary of America's $900 million reconstruction pledge is Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who needs to make inroads in the Hamas-governed strip to shift the balance of power among Palestinians in his favor - and perhaps toward a resumption of peace talks.

Iraqi provincial elections see 50 percent turnout BAGHDAD: Just more than half of Iraq's 15 million registered voters cast ballots in weekend provincial elections, with turnout as low as 40 percent in at least one province, but Iraqi and international officials insisted yesterday that they were satisfied with the participation. U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker characterized the turnout as "large," and Iraq's top election official called it the most important election to take place since the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein.

Amid cease-fire, clash in Gaza Strip kills two GAZA CITY: Palestinian militants killed one Israeli soldier and seriously wounded another in a cross-border bombing yesterday morning, prompting an Israeli counterattack that killed a Palestinian farmer and wounded a Hamas fighter. The clash, near the central Gaza border crossing of Kissufim, is the most serious threat so far to the separate cease-fires declared by Israel and Hamas that have largely held since Jan. 18, after a three-week Israeli offensive.

The United States' new Mideast envoy, George J. Mitchell, arrives in the region with a presidential imperative to listen and a sense of d?j? vu. This is not new territory for the former Maine senator. The geopolitical landscape hasn't changed much from when Mr. Mitchell last reported on the situation for former President George W. Bush in 2001. The polarizing personalities of Israel's Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are gone from the scene, but the underlying issues of the conflict - terrorism, settlements, Jerusalem's future - remain obstacles to a negotiated resolution and two secure states coexisting in peace.

Push Israel to accept Arab peace initiative The article "Hamas acts to reassert control in Gaza" (Jan. 20) buried critically important information in the text that should have been in the headline: It reported that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had warned Israel that a peace offer from 22 Arab countries that recognizes Israel's right to exist within its 1967 borders "will not always remain on the table." The initiative promises normalized diplomatic and economic relations with Israel in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza along the borders that existed before 1967.