Gaza Strip

George J. Mitchell, the new U.S. envoy to the Middle East, arrived in Israel on Wednesday to begin testing his axiom that there's no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended. Yet even as Israeli and Palestinian leaders offered ideas on how the Obama administration can help bring about peace, the prevailing mood on both sides was that their decades-old fight had become almost hopelessly deadlocked.

It was a voice of anguish that pierced a nation. Israeli TV broadcast a father's heartbreak Friday night when a Palestinian doctor living in Gaza made a frantic phone call to a newscaster saying an Israeli tank had shelled his home, killing three of his daughters and injuring other family members. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who speaks Hebrew, worked as a gynecologist in an Israeli hospital.

She was the strongest among them, the natural leader. So when the shelling stopped and the Israeli soldiers announced through loudspeakers that all residents should come out of their homes and head for the center of town, neighbors turned to Rawhiya Najar for guidance. Emptying the cupboards of sheets and tablecloths -- anything white -- she led a procession of 20 women and children into the streets holding a white flag in each hand, residents say.

With Israel and Hamas both claiming victory in the Gaza Strip, there is one clear loser: the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority, which desperately wants a peace accord with Israel and a unified Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel's 22-day assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza made the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority look ineffective and marginalized, unable to stop the carnage. Popular support for its peace talks with Israel, already declining, now seems weaker than ever.

The farmer and his sons waited until the daily lull in the Israeli offensive before attempting their dash for safety. About 1 p.m. Friday, Mohammed Shurrab and his two sons piled into a red Land Rover and fled the family's farm in the village of Fukhari, southeast of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Kassab, a 28-year-old engineer, sat in the front passenger seat and Ibrahim, an 18-year-old college student, sat in the back. They didn't get far.

Some of them are said to be big enough to accommodate railroad cars. They may reach a depth of 60 feet, and are reported to be equipped with cables and electric motors that move food, fuel -- and probably some of the heaviest rockets that Hamas aims at Israel. They also are one of the main reasons fighting is continuing in the Gaza Strip.

She was a girl with cuts on her face, lying in a hospital bed near her mother. Hours earlier, before dawn in the Gaza Strip town of Khoza, the Israeli soldiers came and the firefights and shelling rattled and shook the darkness. Everyone without a gun scattered. Ambulances moved out to collect the wounded. Fourteen-year-old Alaa Khalid ran with her mother and brother to hide. There was a boom and she remembered nothing until she woke up in a bed at the Nasser Hospital.

The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. "This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness," a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in an unusual public criticism of Israel, said Wednesday that its plan to destroy dozens of Palestinian homes in Arab East Jerusalem was "unhelpful" and contrary to Israel's obligations under a U.S.-backed peace plan. Clinton, closing her first foray into Middle East peacemaking, said the implications of the decision to raze the homes for an archaeological project "go far beyond" the 88 homes affected by Israel's plans.

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive. The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.