Word: gaza
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...took explosives to do what diplomacy couldn't: allow Palestinians to go on a shopping spree. The siege of Gaza, imposed by Israel and the international community after Hamas seized control of the Palestinian territory last July, ended abruptly before dawn on Wednesday when militants blew as many as 15 holes in the border wall separating the territory from Egypt. In the hours that followed, over 350,000 Palestinians swarmed across the frontier, nearly one fifth of Gaza's entire population...
...latest cycle of conflict over Gaza casts a dark shadow over President Bush's efforts to broker a Middle East peace. Palestinian anger over the plight of Gaza forced President Mahmoud Abbas to threaten to withdraw from U.S.-sponsored peace talks with Israel. Abbas later said he'd stick it out, although Palestinian officials in Ramallah tell TIME that the Palestinian President is becoming increasingly isolated among his people, and even inside his own Fatah movement. Says Salah Bardoweel, a Hamas legislator, "This new round of attacks by Israel creates a belief that there is a security coordination between Ramallah...
...President Bush's attempts to corral other Arabs into his peace initiative also took a hit because of Gaza. On Monday, pro-Hamas protests spread throughout the Middle East, and even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - no friend of the Palestinian Islamists - reportedly called Israeli officials and asked them to lift the Gaza blockade. On Tuesday Egyptian police clashed with Palestinian protesters, who tried to force open Egypt's locked gate with Gaza at the Rafah crossing. At least 50 protesters, many of them women, were injured...
...Gaza crisis is also a setback for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In two weeks, he faces the release of a possibly scathing report card by the Winograd committee, appointed by the Israeli government to investigate the many failures that occurred in Israel's 2006 military campaign in Lebanon. Hoping to distract Israelis from the report's anticipated criticism of his performance, Olmert and his government had been working furiously, through Egyptian channels, to free Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit who has been held hostage by Hamas in Gaza since the spring...
...Hamas commander told TIME that the three-step deal - in which 300 Hamas prisoners would be freed, then Shalit followed by thousands more Hamas inmates - was "80% finished". But talks fell apart after Israelis killed 17 Palestinian militants in Gaza last week, one of them the son of a senior Hamas hard-liner. Now, Olmert has no chance of springing the Israeli captive and deflecting attention away from the possibly damning Winograd report...