Gaza Strip

More than 20,000 Israeli peace activists packed into Tel Aviv's main square Saturday night to protest a wave of vigilante raids by Jewish settlers in the occupied areas. Led by the Peace Now movement and dovish members of Parliament, including Labor Party members, they called on the government to crush what they called settler lawlessness. Military officials confirmed that the army plans to crack down on Jewish settlers who rampage through Arab areas and confront soldiers.

Re "Is a two-state solution dead?," Editorial, May 9 The Times' editorial advocating a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians focuses on Israel. The current Israeli government supports a viable two-state solution, which is not the case on the Palestinian side. Hamas in the Gaza Strip has no intention of accepting Israel. The "moderate" Palestinian Authority distributes maps that do not show Israel as a country, instead showing only Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Until the Palestinians are willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state, peace talks are useless.

Israeli soldiers Sunday fatally shot two Palestinians during clashes in the occupied territories, a 12-year-old boy and a 60-year-old man, and Israeli sailors destroyed a rubber dinghy off the southern Lebanon coast, killing four Palestinian guerrillas headed toward Israel. Arab reports said 11 Palestinians were wounded in violence that came on the second day of a general strike in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the West Bank city of Hebron, a curfew was imposed after troops shot to death a 60-year-old laborer.

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when a comprehensive rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians seemed not just possible but inevitable. In the mid-1990s, the two-state solution was gaining support on both sides. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were losing influence. Israel was handing over West Bank cities to Palestinian control. The 50-year-old conflict seemed to be nearing a resolution. Of course, that never came to pass. Peace fizzled in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the terrorist bombs of the Palestinian militants, among other things.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Friday he rejects trading land for peace despite an earlier government statement that Israel is willing to discuss any option with the Palestinians. "I don't accept it. It is not necessary. It is not relevant," he told reporters upon his return to Israel from the United States. Shamir, 73, described his 10-day U.S. visit as a success and added: "There is an understanding between the U.S. and Israel about our four-point peace initiative." Shamir met last week with President Bush, who supported Shamir's idea for elections in the occupied territories but said the United States could not accept permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Riots broke out across the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on Friday, leaving at least a dozen people dead, as Palestinians protested the dawn massacre by a Jewish settler of 48 Muslims as they prayed in a mosque in Hebron, south of Jerusalem. More than 300 people were wounded throughout the day, scores during the massacre at the mosque and the rest in clashes that followed there, in other West Bank towns, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem's Old City, according to figures compiled from hospital reports.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Friday called on Palestinians to kill Americans and other Westerners to avenge their dead in the 17-month uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The call provoked an immediate reaction from Washington, where the Administration issued a worldwide alert to American diplomatic and military installations, warning of a possible renewal of terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. In an inflammatory declaration, Rafsanjani said that "the people of Palestine . . . must avenge the blood (of the reported 461 Palestinian deaths in the occupied territories)

Israeli planes carried out airstrikes against targets in the Gaza Strip today, injuring seven people, Palestinian medical workers said. An Israeli army spokesman said the strikes had targeted two factories in central and northern Gaza used to make weapons and a smuggling tunnel under the border with Egypt. The spokesman said the airstrikes were in response to a rocket fired from Gaza Saturday. The rocket landed near the city of Sderot, causing no injuries or damage, he said.

Egypt's decision Tuesday to open its border with the Gaza Strip after Israel's deadly raid on an aid flotilla highlights the difficult position Cairo faces in its uncomfortable relationship with the coastal enclave. The government of President Hosni Mubarak had closed the border for all but a few days each month in an effort to weaken the militant group Hamas, which controls the strip. Much of the Arab world assails that policy as capitulation to U.S. and Israeli interest at the expense of Gaza's 1.5 million long-suffering residents.

The army clamped curfews today on 180,000 Arabs living in Gaza Strip refugee camps to prevent violence after activists called a general strike Saturday to mark the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon. Indefinite curfews were imposed on the refugee camps Bureij, Jabaliya, Nusseirat, Khan Yunis and Shati to prevent clashes during the anniversary. Four West Bank villages also were under curfew.

The toll on civilians from violence between the Israeli military and militants based in the Gaza Strip rose Monday as three Palestinians — a 15-year-old boy on his way to school and a father and daughter walking in the street — were killed by Israeli airstrikes, Palestinian officials said. Militants from Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees on Monday fired rockets into southern Israel, hitting an empty kindergarten and damaging a residential structure in the city of Ashdod, injuring an elderly woman and another person with shrapnel.

In November 1947, shortly after the United Nations voted for partition of the Holy Land into separate Arab and Jewish states, Chaim Weizmann was cited by the New York Times as saying that "the most important work now was to build Palestine. " What? To build Palestine? Yes, in 1947 the word "Palestinian" — if it meant anything at all — referred to Jews living in Palestine. The Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post) was the Jewish English-language newspaper. The Palestine Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic)

The Israeli armed forces and militants based in the Gaza Strip exchanged attacks Saturday in a sharp escalation of violence that killed nine Palestinians and one Israeli. Palestinian sources said five Islamic Jihad militants were killed in an initial Israeli airstrike near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, including a prominent maker of rockets. Israeli news reports said the airstrike targeted a cell responsible for launching a rocket into Israel recently. The army said the strike was not in retaliation for an attack, but was instead a preventive action.

It goes without saying that Palestinians and Arabs are outraged by the idea that the United States is threatening to block recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations. What is less obvious, perhaps, is that some of the most vociferous critics of the Palestinian bid for upgraded U.N. recognition are Palestinians themselves. How could it be that advocates of Palestinian rights could be suspicious of, if not altogether opposed to, the U.N. gambit? Isn't the creation of an internationally recognized independent state the goal shared by all Palestinians?

After decades of failed negotiations over a Palestinian state, it is tempting to imagine that the potential vote in the U.N. General Assembly on Palestinian statehood might help finally resolve one of the most vexing problems that the world has inherited from the previous century. And after all, that's just how a Jewish state was born — by a U.N. General Assembly vote in 1947. But a U.N. vote that seeks to bypass negotiations and impose a fait accompli on Israel will only undermine a two-state solution.

Political novices Re "Romney, Perry again trade accusations," Sept. 15 I recently took a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. I met wonderful people from all over the globe. It was embarrassing that they all knew so much about events in the United States, yet we knew so little about their countries. They were amused about our never-ending presidential election. When I returned home, I was amazed to learn that, although no one had yet cast a vote, the media has declared this to be a two-man GOP race.

The Gaza Strip is a 100-square-mile area along the Mediterranean that Israel has occupied since 1967's Six-Day War. About 40% of the area is home to 2,200 Israeli settlers. Crammed into the remaining space are 650,000 Palestinian Arabs, making the Gaza Strip among the most densely populated sites on Earth. More than half of Gaza's population is under age 20 and has known only Israeli rule. That rule, never quietly accepted, is again being violently protested.

Re "Defeat Hamas to defeat Iran," Opinion, Jan. 4 In maintaining that Israel is really fighting Iran in Gaza, not Hamas or the Palestinians, Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren conveniently ignore the historical relations between Hamas and Iran. Hamas arose during the first Palestinian intifada with its own philosophy and beliefs. Iran's initial offers of aid were spurned by Hamas' leadership as pure opportunism. Today, Iran provides little more than lip service to Hamas' cause for its own propaganda efforts.

Taking a stand on Israel Re " 'Delegitimization' is just a distraction," Opinion, July 17 M.J. Rosenberg writes: "Rather than seeking Israel's elimination, the Palestinians … are seeking establishment of a state alongside Israel. " Of the inconvenient truths Rosenberg avoids, none undermines his point more than the actual opinions of Palestinians, as revealed by a survey conducted by pollster Stanley Greenberg. That poll found that only 34% of Palestinians accept the two-state solution; 66% believe Palestinians should start with a two-state solution and then move toward making it one Palestinian state; and 72% supported efforts to deny the thousands of years of Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

Israeli naval vessels Tuesday seized a French-flagged protest boat carrying 16 pro-Palestinian passengers as it attempted to break through Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials said the takeover occurred without the kind of violence and bloodshed that erupted last year when nine Turkish activists on a ship in a protest flotilla were shot and killed by Israeli commandos who came under attack by passengers as the troops dropped onto the vessel from helicopters. The latest protest ship, called Dignite-Al Karama, was rerouted to Israel's Ashdod port, where passengers and crew were detained.