Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
A senior Palestinian official said the Palestinians are ready to drop their demand for a complete settlement freeze to get peace talks with Israel back on track.
Talks have been stalled since September over Palestinian demands for a halt to all Israeli housing construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
In the absence of negotiations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has agreed to reconcile with the rival Hamas militant group and pledged to ask the UN for recognition of their independence.
But with both of those efforts now in trouble, the official said the Palestinians are willing to tolerate limited settlement construction if Israel accepts a recent peace plan floated by President Barack Obama.
Palestinians easing demands for settlement freeze - Israel News, Ynetnews
Militants carried out a series of attacks on Israeli buses and cars on a highway near the border with Egypt midday Thursday, highlighting the deteriorating stability along the open frontier between the two neighbors. The coordinated attacks on at least three separate targets north of the city of Eilat that left at least seven Israelis dead, including one soldier, and dozens injured were highly unusual for the quiet border region. Surprised by the scope of the attacks, Israel security forces killed some seven militants. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Palestinian militants in Gaza are exploiting Egypt's weakening control in the vast Sinai peninsula since the popular revolt that unseated former President Hosni Mubarak in February.
"This incident reflects the weakened Egyptian hold on Sinai and the expansion of terrorist elements," Mr. Barak said in a statement. "The source of the terrorist attacks is Gaza and we will act against them with full strength and resolve." In the wake of Egypt's revolution, many Israelis were concerned that the turmoil would spill over into their country. Today's multipronged assault on Israeli citizens and soldiers that came on the heels of several attacks on Israel's energy supplies drew calls for the Jewish state to bolster its defenses along the porous border with Egypt. "We were sure that we wouldnt be able avoid the anarchy in Egypt," says Eli Shaked, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt. "Unfortunately this time we failed to anticipate the attack and to take the necessary measures. We have a big problem along the border."
Israeli special forces respond to series of attacks
The chain of attacks began around midday, when a band of gunmen in a car opened fire on an Egged commuter bus about 13 miles northwest of Eilat, wounding seven. A military vehicle on the way to the site of the attack triggered a land mine, but wasnt affected. As Israeli special forces pursued the gunmen on land and air, militants fired two antitank missiles against a second commuter bus and an automobile, killing at least five. In recent months, there have been several attacks on a natural gas line supplying Israel, and there have been reports in the Israeli press citing a surge in smuggling over the border to Gaza. Israeli officials believe that militants from Gaza crossed into Sinai and then crossed back into Israel. Egypt denied the attack came from its territory. Hamas also denied the attackers came from Gaza.
Bolstering a porous border
Just last week, Egypt deployed some 1,000 additional soldiers in Sinai after getting authorization from Israel required by the 1979 peace treaty that set up the peninsula as a demilitarized area. After the fall of Mubarak, Israel also accelerated work on a sophisticated border fence to replace the porous barbed wire border markers that area easily penetrable. For years, the porous border between Israel and Egypt has been a smuggling route for African asylum seekers, prostitutes and drugs. Eyewitnesses on Israel Radio reported that today's attacks were perpetrated by gunmen in Egyptian Army uniforms firing from across the border, but the Israeli army said those accounts couldnt be confirmed. No organization took responsibility in the hours immediately following the attack.
Source
For more than two years, a policy of mutual deterrence has prevailed between Israel and Hamas along the Gaza Strip border. But Thursdays militant attacks that killed eight Israelis and Israel's retaliatory air strikes on Gaza highlight a wild card that could destabilize the already precarious region. Weakening Egyptian authority in the sparsely populated Sinai peninsula, which shares a long porous border with southern Israel, offers militants a new route of attack. That creates dilemmas for both Israel and Hamas, neither of which is looking for a major conflict now, say analysts.
"This attack was more than Hamas wanted," says Hillel Frisch, a political science professor at Bar Ilan University. But both Hamas and Israel are but constrained in their ability to deter violence in the Sinai. Unlike attacks launched from Gaza a small, densely populated territory run by Hamas attacks launched from the Sinai are potentially harder to trace to a specific group, and thus harder to assign ultimate responsibility for. "Israel has always wanted to deliver the same message that militant groups in Gaza can be harmed," says Talal Okal, a Gaza-based political analyst. "Now the deterrence challenge has changed. The militants from Gaza can start attacks miles away from Gaza."
Sinai security vacuum?
On Thursday, militants launched a series of attacks on Israeli vehicles near the Sinai-Israel border, not far from the southern resort city of Eilat. Eight Israelis were killed, including one soldier and a policeman. While no group took responsibility, many Israelis blamed Hamas for at least an indirect role in fostering militants who then traveled from Gaza through the Sinai to attack Israel's southern border. "Hamas once again wants to remind the world that it can ignite violence whenever and wherever it wants," Mr. Okal says. "It has used the lawlessness and the absence of security in the Sinai to build up and train militant groups that can reach Israel easily since the borders with Gaza are heavily fortified."
Officials and analysts in both Israel and Gaza blamed the attacks on a weakening of Egyptian security in the wake of the revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak in February. "Since the collapse of the Mubarak regime, the Sinai Peninsula is suffering from a security vacuum," says Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Gazas Al Azhar University. In the wake of Egypt's revolution, Sinai could become a lawless Arab-Israeli flash point like southern Lebanon in the 1980s, says Professor Frisch of Bar Ilan University. That would give the Islamist militant Hamas rulers in Gaza reach beyond their border by allowing militants to travel into Sinai through the underground tunnels along the Gaza-Sinai border.
Hamas seen as being caught off guard
