Islamic Resistance Movement Palestine

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.

A Sudanese official said Thursday that hundreds of people were killed early this year when foreign warplanes bombed three convoys smuggling African migrants through Sudan along with weapons that apparently were destined for the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hinted at his air force's possible involvement in the attacks. They came after Israel ended a 22-day assault on Gaza without fully achieving one of its aims: to choke off Hamas' weapons supply.

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.

Every day, the Hamas rocket teams sneak through the fire and fury of Gaza to launching sites such as trucks, rooftops, school courtyards and mosques. Groups of three to five militants scramble to set up short-range Qassam rockets made in clandestine workshops in the Gaza Strip and longer-range Grads smuggled from Iran. Wary of Israeli jets hunting above the squalid urban maze, the rocket teams aim with the aid of Google Earth and landmarks such as the twin smokestacks of an Israeli power plant.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees suspended aid to the Gaza Strip on Friday, accusing Hamas of stealing a delivery of humanitarian supplies for the second time this week. The announcement by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency deepened tensions between the international body that assists the majority of Gaza's 1.5 million people and the Islamic militant group that controls the coastal strip.

Israeli forces staged their deadliest raid into the Gaza Strip in more than a year Tuesday, killing a Hamas firebrand's son and 17 others and provoking threats by the Islamic group to escalate the conflict just as peace talks between Israel and a secular Palestinian faction are starting. The violence erupted days after President Bush visited Israel and the West Bank, and it underscored the fragility of the peace effort he is promoting on his trip to the Middle East.

Israel agreed to allow limited supplies of fuel, medicine and food into the Gaza Strip today, easing a blockade that left large parts of the Palestinian territory without electricity and drew international protests. The promise of relief also followed a sharp decline in the rocket attacks from Gaza that had prompted Israel to halt the shipments Thursday. Residents of Gaza City spent a second night in cold, dark homes after the coastal enclave's only power plant shut down Sunday.

The collapse of Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip on Wednesday altered the region's political and security landscape as suddenly as it changed the fortunes of Palestinians who poured out of the enclave to stock up on goods made scarce by an Israeli blockade.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday underscored the complexity of resolving the Gaza Strip crisis when he insisted anew that his administration alone should be responsible for the coastal enclave's border crossings.

Egypt resealed its besieged gateway to the Gaza Strip on Sunday after rebuffing Hamas' bid for a hand in controlling the crossing. But analysts said the militant Palestinian group emerged strengthened from the standoff over its breach of the border wall last month. As barbed wire and metal barricades went up across the Rafah crossing's only remaining gap, Hamas made a show of cooperating with Egypt's border guards rather than trying to thwart them.