Israel agreed to let about 900 Gaza pilgrims travel through Israeli territory en route to a Muslim pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, Palestinian and Israeli officials said.

At least four Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli ground incursion into the Gaza Strip. As Robert Berger reports from VOA's Jerusalem bureau, the violence is casting a shadow over efforts to revive the peace process.

Israel killed three Hamas fighters in two air strikes in the south of the Gaza Strip, Hamas officials and Palestinian medical staff said.

Scores of people staged demonstrations in the Gaza Strip against the U.S.-hosted Mideast peace conference while the leader of the Hamas government in Gaza insisted that the summit is "doomed to failure" and said the group will not lay down its arms.

Israeli Defense Forces killed on Tuesday two Palestinian militants and a civilian in the Gaza Strip, Israeli military and Hamas sources said.

Gaza's militants, including the Islamic rulers, Hamas, staged mass protest against the upcoming Mideast conference in Annapolis, asserting no such meetings can deliver Palestinian rights.

Israeli authorities are under fire after the death of a 21-year-old Palestinian man who was barred from leaving the Gaza Strip for cancer treatment in Israel.

Israeli authorities have lifted restrictions on the export of flowers and strawberries from the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian exporters' association spokesman said Wednesday.

Witnesses and hospital officials say Israeli forces have carried out a missile attack on a group of Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip, killing two militants and wounding three other people.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made the first explicit demand for overthrow Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers.

Hamas arrested scores of rival Fatah party members in night-time raids in the Gaza Strip, Fatah officials say, hours after Islamist gunmen opened fire on a mass rally, killing seven people.

Three days of mourning have been declared for seven people killed in the Gaza Strip, Monday. VOA's Jim Teeple reports more than 80 people were wounded in the incident.