West Bank

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.

JERUSALEM - Less than a week before Israeli voters pick a new leader, the candidate most involved in negotiations with the Palestinians is on the defensive over newly reported details of an interim peace accord offered months ago by outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the standard bearer of Olmert's centrist Kadima Party, was already trailing in the polls before the disclosures last week prompted the hawkish front-runner to accuse her of agreeing to "surrender" parts of Jerusalem for an independent Palestinian state.

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.

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.

Last Sunday, The Sun published a comprehensive article by Middle East correspondent John Murphy, reporting that since 2000 Israel has sent more than 5,000 Palestinian juveniles to jail under a largely concealed military justice system. Based on months of detailed work, Murphy documented how a number of juveniles have been arrested - often on trivial charges - and how they are receiving increasingly harsh sentences. Based on statistics from human rights organizations, Israeli military documents and his own reporting, Murphy showed that many of the juveniles are detained for throwing stones and lesser offenses such as membership in a "banned organization" - a charge that can stem from such nonviolent actions as setting up chairs for meetings or putting up posters for militant groups such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

NABLUS, West Bank -- At the Beit Furik checkpoint east of Nablus, a long line of Palestinians presses toward a pair of metal turnstiles, waiting for Israeli soldiers to let them through. The temperature has climbed to 99 degrees. Tensions are rising, too. A 50-year-old Palestinian woman in a black hijab wants to harvest her fields on the other side of the checkpoint, but the soldiers won't allow her to pass. Before the dispute escalates, two Israeli women rush forward, asking if they can help.

MASKIOT, West Bank -- It took thousands of Israeli soldiers and police armed with riot gear and bulldozers to pull Yosi Hazut and hundreds of his neighbors from their hard-line Jewish settlement of Shirat Hayam during Israel's tumultuous and expensive withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Now Hazut and other former Gaza settlers want to build again in the Palestinian territories. This time they plan to construct a settlement in the cinnamon- colored hills of the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.

It won't be a one-day wonder. But if supporters of next Tuesday's peace summit in Annapolis can keep Israeli and Palestinian leaders talking and committed to resolving the core issues that divide them, then the conference won't be a waste of time. Without talks, there can be no negotiated settlement and the preferred resolution to this conflict - a secure Israel, an independent Palestine - will remain no more than an ideal. The decision to reduce the summit to one day was a disappointing acknowledgment of the difficulty in staging these talks and finding agreement on substantive issues.

JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian man was killed and another wounded yesterday as a major Israeli military raid in Nablus kept the heart of the West Bank city under curfew for the second consecutive day. The Israeli army said the incursion, the largest in Nablus in months, was aimed at armed militants and what it calls the "terrorist infrastructure" rooted in a city that has long been a hotbed for Palestinian fighters. Troops backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers operated in the Old City section, a cramped labyrinth of shops and apartments.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Fatah gunmen took aim at Hamas rivals in the West Bank yesterday, storming the Hamas-led parliament and ransacking offices of the Islamist group amid fears that last week's fighting in the Gaza Strip could trigger a wider reprisal campaign here. No deaths were reported during a series of incidents around the West Bank, which came despite Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to rein in militants affiliated with his Fatah party. Fatah still holds sway in the West Bank, but its forces were overpowered in the Gaza fighting, leaving Hamas in sole control of the seaside strip of land.

As the Obama administration moves to transform Palestinian arguments about Israeli settlements into U.S. policy, an examination of the facts underlying these issues is appropriate. There may be no better place to begin than the swimming pool at Rimonim, a Jewish settlement in the heart of the West Bank. The scene is a familiar one. Families picnicking together. Mothers yelling at children to be careful. Young children calling out to moms to watch them do dangerous things. But it is the view from the hilltop pool that is striking.

Citizen planners can do more than conjure waterfalls Grassroots websites to envision a better Baltimore are a worthy topic for a front page Sun story. But giant waterfalls in vacant lots between rowhouses? Let's get serious. Its not really lack of imagination or good design ideas that keeps these lots vacant. They're merely a symptom of dwindling property values that make it uneconomical to build and maintain our communities. But in her article ("Online, an empty lot can be a waterfall," May 16)

NYSE delists General Growth General Growth Properties received a notice April 16 that it was being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because the company is under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is now trading on the pink sheets under the symbol GGWPQ, according to the filing. The company does not plan to appeal the exchange's decision. General Growth owns most of the regional malls in the Baltimore area. Andrea K. Walker Regulators shut down 3 banks WASHINGTON : Regulators shut down Silverton Bank in Georgia on Friday and set up a temporary government-controlled bank until a buyer can be found.

President Barack Obama, speaking recently to the Turkish parliament (but actually targeting the new Israeli government), said, "The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security." Unfortunately, and with all due respect to President Obama, achieving a two-state solution increasingly appears to be an uphill battle. When President Obama hails it as the flagship of his Mideast policy, we had better look again at this two-state solution and check to see if it still holds water.

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.

JERUSALEM - Less than a week before Israeli voters pick a new leader, the candidate most involved in negotiations with the Palestinians is on the defensive over newly reported details of an interim peace accord offered months ago by outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the standard bearer of Olmert's centrist Kadima Party, was already trailing in the polls before the disclosures last week prompted the hawkish front-runner to accuse her of agreeing to "surrender" parts of Jerusalem for an independent Palestinian state.

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.

Israel's week-old assault on the Gaza Strip has widened the rift between Palestinians who back the search by moderate leaders for a peace accord with the Jewish state and those drawn to Hamas' call for armed struggle. The breach was on display yesterday in the West Bank as the territory's U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority leadership, struggling to contain rising anger over the death toll in Hamas-ruled Gaza, sent police to put down pro-Hamas demonstrations. Thousands enraged by the bloodshed have joined protests in West Bank cities.

JERUSALEM - Israel will have to give up "almost all" of the West Bank areas it occupies and accept the division of Jerusalem in order to take advantage of a rapidly closing window of opportunity for peace with the Arabs, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published yesterday. "The decision we are going to have to make is a decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed," the Israeli leader told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharanot. "The time has come to say these things.

YITZHAR, West Bank - A pipe bomb that exploded late last night outside the Jerusalem home of Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University professor, left him slightly wounded and created only a minor stir in a nation that routinely experiences violence on a much larger scale. But Sternhell was noted for his impassioned criticism of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, once suggesting that Palestinians "would be wise to concentrate their struggle against the settlements." And the authorities found fliers near his home offering nearly $300,000 to anyone who kills a member of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli advocacy group, leading them to suspect that militant Israeli settlers or their supporters were behind the attack.