Israelis quit Gaza

Israeli troops and tanks left the Gaza Strip Saturday, witnesses said, after the bloodiest clash in the Hamas-ruled enclave in 14 months killed two soldiers and a Palestinian.The violence underscored the deadlock in US-mediated contacts between Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose peacemaking bids have been sapped by Hamas hostility along with continued Israeli settlement construction on occupied land.

The Arab League, which had given its blessing to indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations only to see that initiative stall like many before it, signalled a major review in strategy.''We have to study the possibility that the peace process will be a complete failure,'' League Secretary-General Amr Moussa told Arab leaders gathered in the Libyan town of Sirte.''It's time to face Israel. We have to have alternative plans because the situation has reached a turning point,'' he said.

The impasse has triggered sporadic rocket attacks this month from Gaza which drew Israeli air strikes, Saturday, Palestinians ambushed soldiers who, the army said, had crossed the border to dismantle a mine. Two infantrymen were killed and two wounded. The skirmish -- in which the army said it believed it had killed two gunmen -- was the fiercest since the three-week Gaza war of early 2009. Some 1,400 Palestinians, mainly civilians, and 13 Israelis, mainly troops, died in that conflict.



Islamist Hamas spurns the Jewish state but has largely held fire since the war. It said its men took part in Friday's fighting, but only in order to repel the Israeli incursion.''We have been used to seeing breakaway (Palestinian) groups doing the firing, and Hamas trying to calm things down. Possibly it is loosening its grip, for all sorts of reasons,'' Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said in a television interview.''Should that indeed prove to be the case, then there will also be ramifications for Hamas,'' he said, but added: ''We have no interest in returning the region to what was in the past.''