Middle East Peace

The Gaza Strip's only electric power plant shut down Sunday evening after Israel halted the shipment of diesel that fuels it, plunging most of this city into darkness and threatening such vital services as hospitals, bakeries, water supply and sewage. Many of Gaza City's 400,000 inhabitants rushed to stock up on candles, batteries and bread, trudging up and down stairs as elevators ground to a halt, and then shivered through a night of temperatures in the low 50s.

Comic Ray Hanania nervously paced backstage at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies and occasionally peeked around the velvet curtains to gauge the mood of the school's packed theater. The downtown audience -- Arab businessmen, a Palestinian professor, Jewish students and Israeli families -- glanced curiously at one another and quietly chatted in their seats. Some fidgeted nervously. "Think it'll be like Tel Aviv?"

Masked gunmen used explosives to blow holes in the Gaza Strip's border fence early today, enabling thousands of Palestinians to pour into Egypt to buy food, fuel and other supplies that had been cut off because of an Israeli blockade, witnesses said. Egyptian and Palestinian border guards did not resist the mass crossing at the Rafah terminal.

A senior commander of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group waging hostilities against Israel, was killed late Friday along with his wife, two of their children and three young militants in an explosion that flattened the family's home in the Gaza Strip, officials said. The 8:45 p.m. explosion damaged seven nearby homes in the Bureij refugee camp and wounded at least 30 people, 10 of them seriously, said Moawiya Hassanain, a Health Ministry official in Gaza.

It was a festive night for the teenage squatters in this renegade hilltop camp. A rabbi was on his way, and they were cranking up a generator, stringing light bulbs and arranging benches, turning what had been a Palestinian family's barn into a synagogue. Suddenly the group fell silent. An Israeli soldier and a policeman had trudged up the slope and were demanding to know who was in charge. No one would tell them. After a few tense minutes, the uniformed intruders left.

Three Palestinian men picnicking in a field in the northern Gaza Strip were killed Saturday by an Israeli tank missile, said a Palestinian official and relatives of the dead. The Israeli military confirmed the cross-border attack near the city of Beit Hanoun but said it targeted Palestinian militants on their way to fire mortar shells at Israel. A Palestinian Health Ministry official identified two of the dead, Ibrahim Abu Jarad, 25, and Mohammed Hassan, 26, as employees of the Bank of Jordan.

Israeli troops pulled out of the Gaza Strip early today after a 48-hour ground incursion that had prompted growing international criticism and a suspension of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. Mounting casualties in Gaza drew protests from European and Arab capitals and sent thousands of Palestinians into the streets across the West Bank, where Israeli troops killed a teenager during a demonstration Sunday.

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.

The U.S.-backed Palestinian leadership Tuesday rebuffed an appeal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to resume peace talks with Israel, saying they would remain suspended until a truce took hold in the Gaza Strip. "I call on the Israeli government to halt its aggression so the necessary atmosphere can be created to make the negotiations succeed," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said at a joint news conference with Rice at his West Bank compound in Ramallah.

On different sides of this divided city Friday, grieving Israelis laid to rest their murdered sons while a Palestinian family grieved over the loss of the young man who killed them. Both Israelis and Palestinians seemed shocked and anxious as a result of Thursday night's bloodshed and the looming certainty of more to come. Thousands of mourners attended a memorial for the eight Jewish seminary students killed by a Palestinian gunman.