Israel, reversing policy, will let some Palestinian students leave Gaza

TEL AVIV: Senior Israeli officials said Thursday that they would no longer stop all Palestinians who have foreign study grants from leaving Gaza but would look favorably upon their applications for exit permits, a change from the near total ban on movement out of the Hamas-controlled coastal strip since late 2007.

The officials in the Defense Ministry, who declined to be named, said the decision was made by Defense Minister Ehud Barak after the embarrassing misunderstanding with the U.S. State Department last week that produced a cancellation of Fulbright grants to Gaza and then a hurried reinstatement of them.

"We are going to let out students, but in limited numbers," one senior official said. "We're not talking about hundreds." He said that Israel's policy was caught between two aims: to weaken Hamas, an anti-Israel militia that took full control of Gaza one year ago, by imposing a siege on its territory, and to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe there. That means providing 70 truckloads of key supplies every day and letting out hundreds of emergency medical cases but almost no one else.

But, he said, since Israel hopes in the future to have a neighbor that is less poor and better educated, encouraging study grants abroad is in Israel's interest. The population of Gaza is about 1.5 million.

The grants that will be honored include not only American ones like the Fulbright and specific university scholarships, but also those from many other countries in Europe, Asia and the Gulf.

It seemed likely that some students would be permitted to cross out of southern Gaza through Egypt, while others would go through the crossing into Israel.

The central policy of closure remains in place, however. Since, in the wake of the Hamas takeover, the Israeli government decided it no longer wanted responsibility for Gaza, the Defense Ministry's coordinator of government activities in the territories, Major General Yusef Mishlev, has been instructed to turn down exit requests except urgent medical ones.

Still, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice read last Friday of the cancellation of the Fulbright grants, she told her lieutenants to get the Israelis to let them out and to reinstate the scholarships, and that is now happening.

On Wednesday, a car from the U.S. consulate picked up four of the seven Fulbright winners from the Gaza border to take them for visa interviews in Jerusalem, the first formal step in their journey to advanced study in the United States. The other three were still being checked by the Shin Bet internal security service.

Lower level State Department officials had apparently assumed that the new stricter closure of Gaza would make it impossible to get the students out, so they canceled their grants. They said their exit permit requests for the students went unanswered. But Israeli officials said the Americans had failed to draw their attention to the requests as worthy of exception and expediting.

Israel now intends to pursue a modified policy whereby all Gazans with grants to study abroad would submit their names for clearance to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which also opposes Hamas. The names then would come to Mishlev, who would try to move forward their applications for exit permits.

Human rights groups that disapprove of Israel's closure say there are hundreds of Gazans who want to leave to study abroad. But the Israeli officials said repeatedly that those leaving would be restricted in number.

Two die in renewed violence

Palestinian mortar fire killed an Israeli on Thursday, prompting a reprisal strike that apparently missed its target and killed a 6-year-old girl in Gaza, The Associated Press reported.

The sudden burst of violence dealt a new setback to Egyptian efforts to broker a Gaza truce between Israel and Hamas and raised the prospect of harsher violence.

It also came a day after the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called for renewed dialogue with Hamas militants, who overran Gaza a year ago.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the mortar attack on Nir Oz, an Israeli collective village, "as a response to the nonstop aggression against our people."

One shell struck a paint factory, killing a 52-year-old Israeli man and wounding four other people, two seriously, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.

Hours later, Israel mounted an airstrike against Gaza. The Israeli military said it hit a "gunman," but Palestinians said the missile missed a group of militants and hit a nearby house, killing a 6-year-old girl.

The deadly mortar shells were fired from the same area targeted in the airstrike, the military said.

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