Word: shalit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That strategy, though, carries dangers. Already Palestinian militants have retaliated for the Israeli assault--which, for all its ferocity, killed one Palestinian fighter in three days--by kidnapping and murdering an Israeli teenager. The fallout from the Shalit saga is only hardening attitudes on both sides, making the Bush Administration's goal of forging a Middle East peace deal and a Palestinian state more remote. To Israelis, the soldier's abduction and the Palestinians' initial failure to secure his release have highlighted the fecklessness of both Hamas and Abbas, until now the one Palestinian leader acceptable to Israel. Among...
...right. The Israeli offensive sent a message not just to the militants holding Shalit but also to the Palestinian leadership, which Israel accuses of abetting rising violence against Israeli soldiers and citizens. A senior Israeli security official says some members of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government believe the crisis is an opportunity to smash the authority of Hamas, the militant organization that won control of the Palestinian Authority in elections earlier this year. That aim became evident when Israeli forces arrested eight Palestinian Cabinet ministers and 40 Hamas parliamentarians in the West Bank, who may be charged with membership...
Even before Shalit's kidnapping, it would have been a stretch to call the atmosphere placid. For months Gaza militants have fired homemade rockets at Israeli towns, usually missing but causing some injuries and great misery, and drawing Israeli artillery barrages in response. Tensions escalated early last month after seven members of a Palestinian family died in a Gaza beach explosion, which Palestinians blamed on an errant Israeli artillery shell. (Israel denied responsibility.) That prompted Hamas leaders to renounce a 16-month-old cease-fire with Israel, giving an array of Palestinian guerrilla groups the green light to stage...
...Palestinian militants emerged from a tunnel dug 10 yds. deep and stretching from a private house on the Palestinian side of the border to the rear of the Israeli base. Two of the militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank carrying four Israeli soldiers, including Shalit. Two soldiers jumped from the tank and were shot dead. The militants dragged Shalit away and smuggled him through a hole cut in the fence separating Gaza and Israel. When reinforcements finally arrived, they found Shalit's bloody vest, suggesting he had been wounded in the grab...
...Israelis believe Shalit was taken to a hiding place that had been prepared in advance, probably a cellar or cave under a house in the area surrounding Rafah, a teeming city of refugee camps of some 250,000 people. Three separate groups claimed responsibility for the abduction, including the military wing of Hamas, which Israel charged was acting on the directions of Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas supremo in Damascus (see box). Two days into the Gaza incursion, Olmert ordered Israeli forces to halt their advance to allow for a mediation push by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Friday, Mubarak claimed...