West Bank Israel

Israel's army suspended its troop redeployment in the West Bank for 24 hours Thursday after gunmen from PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction freed two Israeli border policemen they had kidnaped and held overnight. The incident in the West Bank town of Janin kept high-level teams of Israelis and Palestinians working through the night to avoid a breakdown in the complex security arrangements being made as part of Israel's military pullback in the region.

Israel will begin its pullout from West Bank towns and villages within a week by handing over some administrative offices in villages to the Palestinian Authority, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israel Radio in remarks broadcast Sunday. Israeli and Palestinian officers are set to meet this week, after the Jewish fasting day of Yom Kippur (which begins at sundown Tuesday), to coordinate each stage of the Israeli army's redeployment out of West Bank population centers.

Israel has failed to keep its pledge to stop enlarging Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged in an interview published Friday, addressing a criticism he expects to hear next week from President Bush. "Every year all the settlements in all the territories [of the West Bank] continue to grow," Olmert told the Jerusalem Post. "There is a certain contradiction in this between what we're actually seeing and what we ourselves promised. . . .

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.

Off a nameless alley in the Balata refugee camp, a poster of Ahmed Sanakreh clutching his assault rifle dominates his parents' living room wall. Ahmed's decision to take up arms came naturally. The teenager idolized his big brother, Ala. The two were inseparable, and when Ala joined the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, Ahmed followed. But last year, as Palestinian leaders began moving to renew peace talks with Israel, the brothers parted ways. Ala gave up his gun. Ahmed kept fighting.

An Israeli soldier fired into a crowd of Palestinian villagers Tuesday, killing a 10-year-old boy, after a protest by residents who oppose Israel's installation of a barrier sealing off the West Bank, witnesses said. The Israeli military said it was investigating the incident in Nilin, near Ramallah, where villagers have been protesting for weeks that the barrier is cutting them off from about 600 acres of their olive groves.

Israel will have to give up "almost all" of the West Bank areas it occupies and accept the division of Jerusalem in order to take advantage of a rapidly closing window of opportunity for peace with the Arabs, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday. "The decision we are going to have to make is a decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed," the Israeli leader told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "The time has come to say these things.

Israeli troops killed a Palestinian man Thursday, the third such fatal shooting in the West Bank in recent days amid escalating tensions among soldiers, Jewish settlers and Palestinians. In three separate incidents since Tuesday, Israeli soldiers have opened fire on Palestinians who they said were about to attack Jewish settlements or military outposts with rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Nearly 600 newly trained Palestinian troops took up positions in this tense city Saturday as part of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' attempt to expand his control in the West Bank and keep the Islamic militant group Hamas in line. Hebron, a former Hamas stronghold, is the third Palestinian city to be reinforced with Abbas' forces. The predawn deployment signaled growing security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Normally, a friendly soccer match between teams ranked 112th and 180th in the world wouldn't be much occasion for excitement. But Sunday's face-off between the Jordanian and Palestinian national teams was far more than a soccer match. It was the first time the Palestinian side had played in the West Bank -- in effect its first actual home game after years of playing as the home team in Jordan and other neighboring Arab countries.