Islamic Resistance Movement Palestine

As sunset approached Sunday, a steady stream of men walked the darkening streets toward Gaza City's Al Nafaq district to pay their respects to the Atallah family. In an open-air enclosure up a side street, dozens of mourners sat on plastic chairs. A loudspeaker blared a sermon lamenting the misfortunes of a family that lost six members in an Israeli airstrike. "I ask God to take them into heaven. I ask God to give their relatives patience," the imam said.

Within hours of the Israeli army's predawn withdrawal from the Gaza Strip on Monday, Hamas was declaring victory in its latest round of armed conflict with the Jewish state. To punctuate its point, more than a dozen rockets were launched during the day at nearby Israeli towns. The message: The two-day Israeli tank incursion that killed more than 60 Palestinians had failed to cripple the rocket-launching capability of Gaza's militants.

Fighting between Israeli forces and militants in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday killed 17 Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers, medical officials and the army said. In the deadliest incident, Israeli strikes killed 12 people and wounded 20 in the Bureij refugee camp, said Muawiya Hassanein, chief of emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. Residents said a helicopter fired at least four missiles, damaging two houses and a mosque.

Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday criticized former President Carter for planning to meet with leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas as he tried to reassure Jewish voters that his candidacy isn't a threat to them or U.S. support for Israel. The Democratic presidential candidate's comments to a group of Jewish leaders were his first on Carter's controversial meeting scheduled this week in Egypt. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen.

Former President Carter wrapped up his controversial Middle East tour Monday with an upbeat account of the militant Hamas movement's position on Israel, but with no apparent progress in promoting a cease-fire or bringing the Islamic group into peace efforts. Hamas turned down Carter's proposals for a one-month suspension of rocket attacks on Israel and a rapid prisoner exchange that would have transferred a captive Israeli soldier to Egypt. Israeli and U.S.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Bush administration explicitly warned former President Carter against meeting with leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip and is regarded by the U.S. as a terrorist group. Rice, speaking in Kuwait, said, "I just don't want there to be any confusion. The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help" further a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

Several Palestinian militant groups signed off Wednesday on a Hamas-sponsored temporary truce proposal that the Islamist movement says could bring calm to Israel's southern border with the Gaza Strip and ease the 10-month economic siege of Gaza. But a cease-fire appears unlikely. Israeli officials say it would merely be a pretext for Hamas and other militant groups to rearm for a new round of hostilities.

The smell of freshly baked bread calms the room filled with women in frayed cloaks and worn slippers. Grateful for the assistance, they walk out of a Muslim Brotherhood social service center into the trash-strewn alley, clutching plastic bags packed with flat bread loaves. For five years, the Jordanian government has clamped down on the Islamist group's electoral ambitions and its charity programs, suspicious it was using good deeds to win political support.

Israeli airstrikes and a raid in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip killed three Hamas militants and two Palestinian civilians, local medical workers and the Islamist group said. An Israeli army spokeswoman denied that a ground incursion had been carried out but acknowledged airstrikes aimed at militants.

For Batya Ibo, it came down to a simple, everyday act. "Today I wasn't afraid to take out the garbage," she said. "The most trivial thing. But before, leaving the house was a tactical decision: yes code red, no code red." Code red, the alert for incoming rockets, was not sounded here Thursday or in other Israeli towns and farming communities bordering the Gaza Strip.