Israeli defense officials say that Israel is to allow from Sunday the resumption of food shipments into the Gaza Strip, halted Wednesday in response to Palestinian rocket attacks. The officials, speaking Saturday night on condition of anonymity as an official statement had not yet been issued, said that a meeting of defense chiefs had decided to allow 80 truckloads to cross. Israel imposed a partial blockade on the strip when the Islamic 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 last Sunday, after a truce with Palestinian militants took effect but clamped down again after three rockets were fired into Israel on Tuesday, lightly wounding two people. Israeli army and Palestinian officials reported the overnight shooting death of a Palestinian teenager who threw Molotov cocktails at an army patrol in the West Bank. The military said soldiers entered the village of Beit Umar, near Hebron, shortly before midnight Friday in an operation to stop fire bomb attacks on Israeli vehicles on 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 a nine-day old truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip but after troops in the West Bank city of Nablus killed two Palestinians, one of them an Islamic Jihad commander, the group launched the three rockets from Gaza in retaliation.
