Palestinian Militants

A family of five Jewish settlers, including three children, was stabbed to death Friday night near the West Bank city of Nablus, ending a relative lull in deadly violence in the Palestinian territory. Two other small children escaped harm by hiding as unknown attackers apparently sneaked into the family's home with a knife and killed the parents and children, ages 12, 3 and 3 months. It was the deadliest such attack against Jewish settlers in the area since 2002. Israeli military officials immediately declared the Itamar settlement and surrounding Palestinian villages to be a closed military zone, setting up roadblocks and launching a massive search for the attackers.

Egypt's revolution brought sudden and unintended freedom to Ayman Nofal. During the chaos in Cairo, the senior Hamas commander broke out of an Egyptian jail with thousands of other prisoners, traversed the Sinai desert in a series of getaway cars, crawled through a smuggling tunnel at the border and emerged back home in the Gaza Strip to a hero's welcome. Now Nofal has one thing on his mind. "I'm anxious to get back to fighting Israel," the 37-year-old Palestinian militant said in his Nuseirat refugee camp home, surrounded by several of his six children and a plastic flower bouquet.

The Egyptian government announced Sunday that it had "conclusive proof" that an Al Qaeda-linked Palestinian militant group orchestrated the New Year's Day bombing outside a Coptic Christian church that killed 25 worshipers and exacerbated sectarian tensions across Egypt. Interior Minister Habib Adly blamed the attack on the Army of Islam, an extremist organization based in the Gaza Strip. The naming of foreigners as the culprit may help Egyptian authorities in easing escalating tensions between Muslims and Copts, who make up about 10% of the nation's population.

Syrian President Bashar Assad described Hamas as an "uninvited guest" in his country in confidential conversations with American lawmakers, and appeared to suggest he would be willing to give up the alliance in exchange for incentives, according to several documents contained in the trove of leaked diplomatic cables posted online by the website WikiLeaks. But even as Assad appeared willing to downgrade ties with the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, he brushed off pressure to change the dynamics of his friendship with Iran.

As Israeli and Palestinian leaders headed to Washington for a much-anticipated peace summit, four Israelis were killed Tuesday near the disputed West Bank city of Hebron after their vehicle came under fire from unidentified gunmen. The militant Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, later took responsibility for the attack. Drive-by shootings on the roads near the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba adjoining Hebron and the Gush Etzion settlement block to the north are not uncommon, though Tuesday's attack was one of the deadliest in months.

Shortly after he was seized by Palestinian militants, Gilad Shalit wrote of his ordeal as an "intolerable and inhumane nightmare." The letter, one of just three the captive Israeli soldier has been allowed to write, appealed to authorities to bring him home from his "closed and solitary prison" in the Gaza Strip. Wednesday, after more than three years of indirect negotiations for his freedom, Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers reported the first tentative step toward a deal -- the exchange of 20 female Palestinian prisoners for a recent videotape as proof of Shalit's well-being.

A United Nations inquiry concluded Tuesday that Israeli and Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes during their conflict in the Gaza Strip, and it called on both sides to prosecute wrongdoers or face possible intervention by an international court. The probe led by former South African Judge Richard Goldstone detailed what investigators called Israeli actions "amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity," during a 22-day winter offensive against Hamas-led rocket squads in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians, many of them civilians, were killed.

A Palestinian man slipped into a West Bank settlement with a pickax Thursday and killed an Israeli teenager, bringing Israel's new conservative government under pressure from the extreme right to react forcefully. On his second full day in office, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heard demands from inside and outside his government to tighten Israel's already stringent curbs on Palestinians in the West Bank.

A demonstrator from California was seriously wounded in a clash between protesters and Israeli troops over Israel's West Bank barrier. Peace activists with the International Solidarity Movement said Tristan Anderson of the Oakland area was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops. "He's in critical condition, anesthetized and on a ventilator and undergoing imaging tests," said Orly Levi, a spokeswoman at the Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv. She described Anderson's condition as life-threatening.

Palestinian militants killed one Israeli soldier and seriously wounded another in a cross-border bombing Tuesday morning, prompting an Israeli counterattack that killed a Palestinian farmer and wounded a Hamas fighter. The clash, near the central Gaza border crossing of Kissufim, is the most serious threat so far to the separate cease-fires declared by Israel and the militant group Hamas that have largely held since Jan. 18 after a three-week Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.