Israel will allow food shipments into Gaza

JERUSALEM —  Israel will allow the resumption of food shipments into the Gaza Strip today after a four-day halt in response to Palestinian rocket attacks, Israeli defense officials said.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official statement had not been issued, said that defense chiefs had decided to allow 80 truckloads to cross into the coastal enclave.

Israel imposed a partial blockade on the strip when the militant group Hamas seized power there a year ago, then tightened it in retaliation for constant rocket and mortar attacks from the territory.

It began easing restrictions a week ago, after a truce with Palestinian militants took effect, but clamped down again after three rockets were fired Tuesday into Israel, injuring two people.

There were no reported attacks Saturday from Gaza.

In the West Bank, the Israeli army and Palestinian officials reported the death overnight of a Palestinian teenager who was shot after throwing Molotov cocktails at an army patrol.

The military said soldiers entered the village of Beit Umar, near Hebron, shortly before midnight in an operation to stop firebomb attacks on Israeli vehicles along a nearby highway. The troops shot a militant who threw two Molotov cocktails at them, a military spokesman said.

Palestinians said the shots killed Mohammed Alameh, 17, one of a group of youths who fought the soldiers.

The West Bank is not covered by the 9-day-old truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. After troops in the West Bank city of Nablus killed two Palestinians, one of them an Islamic Jihad commander, his group launched the three rockets from Gaza in retaliation.

The truce, worked out after months of Egyptian mediation, began June 19 and is initially set for six months.

Hamas and an official of the Western-backed government of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas restated support Saturday for the fragile cease-fire.

“We have made every effort to make the truce succeed,” Ahmed Korei, Abbas’ chief negotiator with Israel, told reporters after meeting Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere in Ramallah. “We call on everybody to make the truce a success.”

Hamas Interior Minister Said Seyam said other major militant groups had agreed in advance to the armistice and must not break it unilaterally.

“We went into this truce based on consensus,” he said in remarks posted on pro-Hamas websites. “If we want to leave it we have to do that based on consensus too.”