Israelis Israel

Israel's security barrier will eventually carve off 14% of the West Bank, leave 274,000 Palestinians in tiny enclaves and block 400,000 others from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals, a United Nations report said Tuesday. The series of walls, razor wire, ditches and fences has inflamed already high tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. Israel has said the barrier is meant to keep out Palestinian extremists responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis in the last three years.

Israel's agreement Sunday to withdraw troops from the West Bank city of Bethlehem and parts of the Gaza Strip in exchange for a Palestinian crackdown on militants has produced a limited, shaky cease-fire. It could, however, open the way to a broader halt in the two years of violence that has killed nearly 600 Israelis in mostly suicide bombings and 1,500 Palestinians in targeted assassinations and army assaults.

President Chaim Herzog today said the ransacking of synagogues by Israelis is akin to "domestic anti-Semitism" and called the dispute between secular and religious Israelis that sparked the acts a disgrace to the Jewish state. Renewed concern over tensions between secular and ultra-Orthodox Israelis followed a weekend of violence in which vandals painted swastikas on Tel Aviv's central synagogue and ripped up religious books and broke windows in a seminary.

Re "Call It What It Is: a Global Surge of Anti-Semitism," Commentary, July 17: Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a brilliant piece bringing our attention to what he identifies as "Jew-hatred." He even anticipates and inoculates his argument against the obvious criticisms, yet he succeeds only in citing as examples of anti-Semitism the actions of very few individuals and fewer states or institutions. Far from denying the Holocaust, which is Halevi's corollary charge, I imagine that having survived that horrible period, when anti-Semitism was not just a notion of a few ignorant zealots but the overt policy of more than a few governments and an operative undercurrent even in the U.S., Jews everywhere might accept as incumbent upon themselves the principles of compassion, tolerance, peace and nonviolence.

The Israeli Labor Ministry announced plans today to crack down on 60,000 Palestinians working in the Jewish state illegally and free their jobs for unemployed Israelis. Some government officials said privately that the purpose was to punish Palestinians for the 17-month-old uprising against Israeli rule. Criticism came from within the government and from liberal legislators. Shimon Peres, finance minister and deputy prime minister, told Israel radio that expelling workers would cause economic problems for Palestinians and would inflame the uprising.

Two Palestinian gunmen infiltrated a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and killed at least two Israelis early today, officials said, hours after armored units moved into Jenin, enforcing a curfew on the 40,000 residents of the Palestinian city. An army spokeswoman said that armed settlers shot dead one of the gunmen in the Karmei Tzur settlement just north of Hebron and that Israeli troops were searching for a second attacker, who escaped.

Israel freed three kidnaped Lebanese civilians in south Lebanon Saturday nearly 36 hours after its commandos grabbed the wrong men. The three, including part-time Reuters correspondent Shawki Fahs, were handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Israel's security zone in south Lebanon. Unshaven and haggard after questioning in Israel, Fahs, 43, shepherd Hassan Zhour, and Kamel Nahal, who works for a TV company, hugged relatives when they reached home.

After two days of Israeli-Palestinian wrangling and intensive U.S. mediation, Israel announced early today that a dispute over a key security demand in the new peace agreement was resolved, allowing the Cabinet to meet and discuss ratification. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had refused to convene his Cabinet to vote on the land-for-security accord until he received U.S.

Israel on Wednesday killed a Palestinian militant it blamed for making powerful bombs that blew up three mammoth battle tanks this year, leaving seven soldiers dead and sending shock waves through the Israeli military establishment. The strike on 35-year-old Mustafa Sabah, who was affiliated with a relatively small Palestinian militant group, was swift and decisively lethal.

The pile of rubble and twisted metal was just a few feet high, providing few clues that it was once the three-story home of a family of 12. Witnesses said a predawn Israeli airstrike killed a 41-year-old Shiite Muslim cleric named Adel Akkash, along with his wife and 10 children, during a wave of air assaults that began hours after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight.