Smoke rose over Gaza City on Sunday, as Israel widened its range of targets to include buildings used by the news media.
CAIRO — Emboldened by the rising power of Islamists around the region, the Palestinian militant group Hamas demanded new Israeli concessions to its security and autonomy before it halts its rocket attacks on Israel, even as the conflict took an increasing toll on Sunday.
After five days of punishing Israeli airstrikes on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and no letup in the rocket fire in return, representatives of Israel and Hamas met separately with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Sunday for indirect talks about a truce.
The talks came as an Israeli bomb struck a house in Gaza on Sunday afternoon, killing 11 people, in the deadliest single strike since the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalated on Wednesday. The strike, along with several others that killed civilians across the Gaza Strip, signaled that Israel was broadening its range of targets on the fifth day of the campaign.
By the end of the day, Gaza health officials reported that 70 Palestinians had been killed in airstrikes since Wednesday, including 20 children, and that 600 had been wounded. Three Israelis have been killed and at least 79 wounded by unrelenting rocket fire out of Gaza into southern Israel and as far north as Tel Aviv.
Hamas, badly outgunned on the battlefield, appeared to be trying to exploit its increased political clout with its ideological allies in Egypt’s new Islamist-led government. The group’s leaders, rejecting Israel’s call for an immediate end to the rocket attacks, have instead laid down sweeping demands that would put Hamas in a stronger position than when the conflict began: an end to Israel’s five-year-old embargo of the Gaza Strip, a pledge by Israel not to attack again and multinational guarantees that Israel would abide by its commitments.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel stuck to his demand that all rocket fire cease before the air campaign lets up, and Israeli tanks and troops remained lined up outside Gaza on Sunday. Tens of thousands of reserve troops had been called up. “The army is prepared to significantly expand the operation,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting.
Reda Fahmy, a member of Egypt’s upper house of Parliament and of the nation’s dominant Islamist party, who is following the talks, said Hamas’s position was just as unequivocal. “Hamas has one clear and specific demand: for the siege to be completely lifted from Gaza,” he said. “It’s not reasonable that every now and then Israel decides to level Gaza to the ground, and then we decide to sit down and talk about it after it is done. On the Israeli part, they want to stop the missiles from one side. How is that?”
He added: “If they stop the aircraft from shooting, Hamas will then stop its missiles. But violence couldn’t be stopped from one side.”
Hamas’s aggressive stance in the cease-fire talks is the first test of the group’s belief that the Arab Spring and the rise in Islamist influence around the region have strengthened its political hand, both against Israel and against Hamas’s Palestinian rivals, who now control the West Bank with Western backing.
It also puts intense new pressure on President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was known for his fiery speeches defending Hamas and denouncing Israel. Mr. Morsi must now balance the conflicting demands of an Egyptian public that is deeply sympathetic to Hamas and the Palestinian cause against Western pleadings to help broker a peace and Egypt’s need for regional stability to help revive its moribund economy.
Indeed, the Egyptian-led cease-fire talks illustrate the diverging paths of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the original Egyptian Islamist group. Hamas has evolved into a more militant insurgency and is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, while the Brotherhood has effectively become Egypt’s ruling party. Mr. Fahmy said in an interview in March that the Brotherhood’s new responsibilities required a step back from its ideological cousins in Hamas, and even a new push to persuade the group to compromise.
Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner, Irit Pazner Garshowitz and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Peter Baker from Bangkok.
Despite his recent split from Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber still had a date for the 40th American Music Awards on Sunday: his mother, Pattie Mallette.
Malette – who recently penned Nowhere But Up: The Story of Justin Bieber's Mom – looked thrilled to pose for photographs with her son.
When Bieber won the first award of the night, for favorite pop/rock male artist, his proud mother, 38, beamed.
"I want to say this is for all the haters who thought I was just here for one or two years. I feel like I'm going to be here for a very long time," the singer said as he accepted the award.
The award was a highlight during a rocky week for Bieber, who on Friday reunited with Gomez, 20, for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles. But just five minutes after entering the restaurant, the couple emerged with Gomez looking visibly "mad," says a source.
Later that night, Bieber Tweeted "Things aren't always easy. there is a lot of pressure. im figuring it all out. im trying. but i care, i notice, i still hear u. #Beliebers."
LONDON (AP) — Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.
There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.
Meningitis mainly affects infants and children. It kills about 8 percent of patients and leaves others with lifelong consequences such as brain damage.
In a statement on Friday, Andrin Oswald of Novartis said he is "proud of the major advance" the company has made in developing its vaccine Bexsero. It is aimed at children over two months of age, and Novartis is hoping countries will include the shot among the routine ones for childhood diseases such as measles.
Novartis said the immunization has had side effects such as fever and redness at the injection site.
Recommendations from the European Medicines Agency are usually adopted by the European Commission. Novartis also is seeking to test the vaccine in the U.S.
On the menu at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex cafeteria on a recent Friday was petite beef patties on whole wheat buns, a cup of roasted potato wedges, an apple and a carton of 1% milk.
Together, the carefully portioned and paired foods amounted to about 730 calories — safely below a recently implemented 850-calorie cap for high school lunches.
But walk out of the cafeteria, through the circle of giggling cheerleaders and the huddle of boys eyeing them, to the long line of students snaking around a corner and you'll find another option: the student store.
With a few crumpled bills and a smile at the woman running it, a sophomore makes off with an alternative lunch: a bag of cheese balls; a bottle of pineapple, peach and mango juice; three packages of brown sugar Pop-Tarts; and a strawberry ice cream bar. The items equated to 1,200 calories.
Unlike the Los Angeles Unified School District's cafeterias, which are managed by its food services department, the more than 160 student stores on middle and high school campuses have a bit more autonomy.
For students, the stores provide an alternative to the cafeteria food one sophomore described as "meh" and a junior called "crazy healthy." For the schools, the stores provide a much-needed cash supplement for their slashed budgets. Proceeds pay for such things as athletic uniforms, school dances and graduation decorations.
At Miguel Contreras, Marisol Morataya is the snack bar czar.
The 20-year-old started working at the student store her junior year and was hired to stay on as an office assistant after graduating.
"Gimme two fishies," a boy said.
Morataya laughed as she handed him two bags of Goldfish crackers with her left hand and his change with her right. "Next," she said.
A dark-eyed boy barked his order — a school beanie and a bottle of water — over the music blaring out of his earphones. Morataya took a $50 bill from him and squinted her eyes at it. "Yup, he's real."
When things get busy, Luke Shen mans the store's second window.
On a recent Friday, the school's financial manager ran his left hand through his hair as he tallied snack sales on a calculator. So far this year the school has made about $7,300 a month on drink and snack sales, he said, but there's still never enough money to go around.
Shen also patrols the school's vending machines. The companies that stock them usually stick to district-approved items, he said, but not always. Last year, for example, he spotted Flamin' Hot Cheetos behind the glass and had them removed.
"They want the business," Shen said. "But we say, 'If it's not on the list, it's not going to happen.' "
Despite a 7-year-old district policy requiring that snacks meet nutritional standards, the stores end up selling snacks that are "kind of hit-and-miss," said David Binkle, the district's interim director of food services.
"People don't know the rules," Binkle said. "Some student stores go to Costco and buy whatever the kids will eat."
Faced with an onslaught of complaints from students about the new healthful food options last year, L.A. Unified scaled them back a bit. Instead of quinoa, for example, burgers are back — albeit without the cheese.
So far the changes seem to be paying off, Binkle said, noting that more students are eating in cafeterias this year than last. The nation's second-largest district serves about 650,000 meals a day.
But for Amilcar Martinez, the cafeteria's changes aren't enough.
"The cafeteria food is meh," the sophomore said as he shoved his hand into the 50-cent bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal from the student store.
Campus stores aren't the only way around the nutrition requirements. Crafty students sell prohibited items while others get food from off-campus fast food joints.
On a recent day at Roosevelt High School, for example, a baseball player hawked Flamin' Hot Cheetos for a buck a bag and a group of juniors had a friend's mom bring them food from off campus — a pile of tortilla chips drenched with liquid cheese, sour cream and a heaping serving of carne asada.
The district, meanwhile, is attempting to market its food options as best it can. A few weeks ago, for example, officials invited a group of elementary school students and their parents to a meal — served on china — with former White House chef Walter Scheib. If they can convince young students that healthful options are cool, the district reasons, perhaps the message will catch.
Before asking the group to pledge to curb junk food and eat more healthfully, Scheib acknowledged how hard it can be.
"It's like stopping smoking," he said. "It's an ugly and brutal process."
Two children look through the rubble of their house after an airstrike in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, on Sunday.
GAZA CITY — Israel pressed its assault on the Gaza Strip for a fifth straight day on Sunday, deploying warplanes and naval vessels to pummel the coastal enclave and striking at two media offices here as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of a possible “significant” expansion in the onslaught.
His words came as militants in Gaza aimed at least one rocket at the Israeli heartland in Tel Aviv, one day after after Israeli forces broadened the attack beyond military targets, bombing centers of government infrastructure including the four-story headquarters of the Hamas prime minister.
“We are exacting a heavy price from Hamas and the terrorist organizations and the Israel Defense Forces are prepared for a significant expansion of the operation,” Mr. Netanyahu told his cabinet at its routine Sunday meeting, referring directly to the call-up of thousands of reservists that, coupled with a massing of armor on the Gaza border, many analysts have interpreted as preparations for a possible invasion.
“I appreciate the rapid and impressive mobilization of the reservists who have come from all over the country and turned out for the mission at hand,” he said. “Reservist and conscript soldiers are ready for any order they might receive.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks were reported shortly after a battery of Israel’s “Iron Dome” defense shield, hastily deployed near the city on Saturday in response to the threat of longer-range rockets, intercepted at least one projectile aimed at Tel Aviv on Sunday, Israeli officials said. The episode was the latest of several salvoes that have illustrated Hamas’s ability to extend the range of its rocket attacks.
The crash of explosions pierced the Gaza City quiet several times throughout the early morning, with one attack injuring several journalists at a communications building, witnesses said. A rocket fired from Gaza ploughed through the roof of an apartment building in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon but there were no immediate reports of casualties there.
The onslaught continued despite talks in Cairo that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said Saturday night he thought could soon result in a ceasefire. Prime Minister Netanyahu said he would consider a comprehensive ceasefire if the launches from Gaza stop.
The attack on the office of the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, one of several on government installations, came a day after he hosted his Egyptian counterpart in that very building on Friday, a sign of Hamas’s new legitimacy in a radically redrawn Arab world.
That stature was underscored Saturday by a visit to Gaza from the Tunisian foreign minister and the rapid convergence in Cairo of two Hamas allies, the prime minister of Turkey and the crown prince of Qatar, for talks with the Egyptian president and the chairman of Hamas on a possible cease-fire.
But Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, denied reports that a truce was imminent.
It was unclear whether the deal under discussion in Cairo would solely suspend the fighting or include other issues. Hamas — which won elections in Gaza in 2006 and took full control in 2007 but is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States — wants to turn its Rafah crossing with Egypt into a free-trade zone and seeks Israel’s withdrawal from the 1,000-foot buffer it patrols on Gaza’s northern and eastern borders.
For his part, Mr. Netanyahu spoke with the leaders of Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, according to a statement from his office. On Sunday, he said he appreciated the “understanding they are displaying for Israel’s right to defend itself.”
But some European leaders seemed to be counseling restraint as much as offering support.
As French media reported that the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, was heading for Israel to seek a ceasefire, William Hague, his British counterpart, cautioned that an Israeli invasion of Gaza “would lose Israel a lot of the international support and sympathy they have” and make it “much more difficult to restrict and avoid civilian casualties.”
As the fighting entered its fifth day, the conflict showed no sign of abating.
Palestinian news agencies reported that two children were killed in a predawn strike on Sunday in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. The Israeli military said it had “targeted dozens of underground launchers” overnight and also hit what it called a Hamas training base and command center. The Israeli Navy “targeted terror sites on the northern Gaza shore line,” the statement said, in repeated rounds of multiple missiles that could be easily heard.
Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza City, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram and Tyler Hicks from the Gaza Strip, Carol Sutherland and Iritz Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem, and David D. Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.
SAN PEDRO, Belize (Reuters) – To the many people who crossed his path on a tropical island in Belize, it was apparent John McAfee’s life had taken some bizarre turns in the past few years.
The anti-virus software guru, who started McAfee Associates in 1989, has been in hiding since police said they wanted to question him about the weekend murder of his neighbor, fellow American Gregory Faull, with whom McAfee had quarreled.
Despite his disappearance, McAfee, 67, has remained in contact with the media, providing a stream of colorful bulletins over his predicament, state of mind and his claim that Belize’s authorities want to kill him.
Residents of the Caribbean island of Ambergris Caye and others who know him paint the picture of an eccentric, impulsive man who gave up a career as a successful entrepreneur in the United States for a life of semi-seclusion in the former pirate haven of Belize, surrounded by bodyguards and young women.
“Never mind the dog, beware of owner,” counsels a small sign, embellished with a sketched hand gripping a large pistol, tacked to the fence separating McAfee’s beachfront swimming pool from the pier that cuts into the azure sea.
McAfee, a yoga fan who has lived on the island for about four years, often moves around with bodyguards, wearing pistols in his belt. Since going into hiding, he has compared his lot to that of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is battling extradition from Britain from inside the Ecuadorean Embassy.
Officials suspect McAfee used designer drugs, and neighbors say he tried to chase them off the public beach in front of his house. Inside his home, a blue-roofed cottage complex, he kept a small arsenal of shotguns and scope-fitted rifles.
There were also complaints about the millionaire’s numerous and noisy dogs. Officials say the poisoning of four of the dogs may be linked to the murder of Faull, a 52-year-old Florida building contractor who was shot dead at his salmon-hued two-story villa about 100 yards (meters) down the beach from McAfee.
Faull was one of the locals who had complained about McAfee’s attitude and his dogs.
McAfee told Wired magazine, with whom he first kept up a running conversation, that he was disguised and holed up in what he describes as a lice-infested refuge. In comments to the magazine, McAfee denied he shot Faull and said he fears that the police will kill or torture him. Police, who believe he is still in Belize, say they just want to talk to him about the killing.
McAfee, who has not responded to requests for comment by Reuters, blamed Belize’s “pirate culture” for his troubles in an essay Wired said he had sent to the magazine.
“Belize is still a pirate haven and is run more or less along the lines established centuries ago by the likes of Captain Morgan, Blackbeard and Captain Barrow,” McAfee said.
Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow has urged McAfee to help police with their inquiries, calling him “bonkers.”
In an interview with CNBC television by phone on Friday, McAfee said he would not seek refuge in the U.S. Embassy.
“What would happen? They will offer me either sanctuary where I will spend my days living in the embassy like poor Julian Assange or when I leave … I will be nabbed by the police. My ultimate goal is they’ll figure out who killed the man, it will have nothing to do with me and they will leave me alone. Or if enough international pressure is applied,” he said.
‘PARANOID’
Many locals in San Pedro describe the tattooed McAfee, who made a fortune developing the Internet anti-virus software that bears his name, as a generous but unstable man.
“He’s a good guy, he helped a lot of people. The problem was when he wanted something he wanted it right now. And when he didn’t get it, he’d get paranoid,” said one islander, a former McAfee employee, who like many people here spoke on condition their name not be used for fear of retribution.
“He’s a complex man, very impulsive,” the islander added.
Doug Singh, Belize’s former police minister, told Reuters he was at a loss to explain McAfee’s recent comments.
“Mr. McAfee seems to have a bit of a divorce from reality and it seems to be consistent in his behavior and some of the things he has said recently. He’s way out of line and out of proportion. Nobody has anything against Mr. McAfee,” Singh said.
After making millions with his anti-virus product, McAfee decided to abandon the United States for Belize, a languid coastal paradise. It is a path that has been taken by a number of rich Americans over the years.
He took a beachfront compound on the island’s isolated and exclusive north side, 6 miles from the town of San Pedro by boat or by driving over badly cratered asphalt and dirt track. It is a world away from California’s Silicon Valley, which he once called home.
He took the company public in 1992 and left two years later following accusations that he had hyped the arrival of a virus known as Michelangelo, which turned out to be a dud, to scare computer users into buying his company’s products.
Officials at the company he created and its parent, Intel, have declined to comment on the controversy.
But one long-time McAfee manager who recently left said company executives were likely monitoring the news closely. He said they have tracked reports of John McAfee’s activities over the years out of concern they might need to do damage control.
A case is already pending in Belize against McAfee for possession of illegal firearms, and police previously suspected him of running a lab to make illicit synthetic drugs.
But McAfee said this week he was opposed to drugs.
“My life is f—-d up enough without drugs, and always has been,” McAfee told Wired magazine.
BENEFACTOR
For all his trouble with authorities, McAfee has worked hard to be the island’s benefactor. Upon arriving in Belize he bought a $ 1 million boat for the country’s new coast guard, and donated equipment to the local police force, according to local reports.
He tipped generously everywhere he went, and hired a steady stream of taxis for frequent female guests on the $ 150 round trip from the small airstrip in San Pedro out to his house.
“Not two or three, a lot of women,” said Artemio Awayo, 24, a local waiter. “Every time I saw him it was a different woman.”
Those who knew him said he didn’t drink and never hung out at the island’s many bars. But employees at a restaurant near the pier where McAfee’s water taxi company is based said his actions grew more bizarre following a police raid last April on his mainland hacienda outside the town of Orange Walk.
Even for casual lunches, McAfee began regularly coming to town with at least two bodyguards, clad in camouflage and each packing pistols, they said.
“Generally, you don’t need a bodyguard in Belize,” said Jorge Alana, a San Pedro Sun reporter who interviewed McAfee several times, noting top elected officials don’t have them. “It does call attention when you move with so many guards.”
McAfee’s home is in a stretch of Ambergris where the wealthiest foreigners hole up. Raw lots of land 100 feet by 200 feet can cost up to $ 500,000 here. Even modest-looking houses reflect multimillion-dollar investments.
On Thursday afternoon, a 23-year-old calling herself Tiffany used a key to enter McAfee’s home with another young woman and said he had spent Saturday night with them – around the time police said Faull’s murder took place.
They had not spoken to McAfee since Sunday, she said.
On Friday, an outside light was still on at his beachfront complex, and a dog roamed freely around the grounds.
Like McAfee, many of his north shore neighbors tend to favor being left alone, rarely coming to town and loath to mix with tourists.
“That’s why they come to San Pedro,” said Daniel Guerrero, the tour guide and real estate broker now serving as the town’s mayor. “They like the quietness. They like the isolation.”
But even fishing, scuba diving and sunset daiquiris can get tiresome. Accustomed to hard work and achievement, newcomers established and kept up the island’s charities, locals say. Quite a few foreigners, like McAfee, started local businesses. And some fall out of synch with local culture.
“It’s one thing to vacation here and another thing living here,” said Wyoming native Tamara Sniffin, owner and editor of the San Pedro Sun, the local newspaper.
Immortalized in song by Madonna as La Isla Bonita, Ambergris Caye stretches 27 miles along the blue Caribbean below the Mexican border, flanking the world’s second-largest barrier reef and some of its finest sport fishing waters.
Those attributes have attracted well-heeled foreign retirees and celebrities such as actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who owns a small island nearby.
“Here it’s just party, party, work, party,” said Iris Mavel, 27, a waitress at a restaurant favored by McAfee. “A lot of couples who come here leave divorced. That’s why they call it Temptation Island.”
The island also has a darker side. Dumped at sea and carried ashore by the tides, bundles of Colombian cocaine flow through the island not far from McAfee’s house and on, many say, toward the Mexican border. Cocaine not recovered by the smugglers is collected by islanders, supplying a thriving local drug market that has sparked low-level gang feuds and occasional killings.
International fugitives have taken refuge here. In the summer, a Slovak man accused of murdering a woman, her 10-year-old son and a gangster in his home country was arrested on an international warrant, processed for extradition but then released by a Belizean judge.
Some townsfolk suspect McAfee is hiding on a yacht off of San Pedro. Others note that Mexico is only an hour away by the sort of fast boat McAfee owns and that passports are never checked for people landing in the oceanfront villages there.
San Pedro’s mayor believes he will surface.
“I have the feeling that this guy will turn up,” Guerrero said. “But he’ll turn up with his attorneys. He’s a big guy.”
(Additional reporting by Jose Sanchez in Belize, Jim Finkle in Boston, Noel Randewich in San Francisco and Mike McDonald in Guatemala; Editing by Dave Graham, Kieran Murray and Bill Trott)
Janet Mayer/Splash News Online; Don Arnold/Wireimage
Taylor Swift appears to be taking her love life in a new direction.
The "Never Ever Getting Back Together" singer is seemingly taking her lyrics to heart as she moves on from recent ex, Conor Kennedy, and enjoys the company of One Direction hottie Harry Styles.
"I had to literally do a double-take," an onlooker tells PEOPLE of finding Styles, 18, with Swift, 22, on the set of The X Factor Thursday morning.
Styles was on hand to watch Swift rehearse the debut of "State of Grace," which she performed later that night on the Fox reality show.
"He was smiling at her while she rehearsed. When she was done he jumped up on stage, picked her up, put her over his shoulder and carried her off stage," the onlooker says. "The whole crew was really surprised."
The young singers were also spotted by X Factor host Mario Lopez, who says he was slapped on the back by Styles during Swift's rehearsal.
"I said, 'What are you doing here,' " Lopez said on his 104.3 MY FM radio show Friday. "And he sort of [pointed] toward Taylor."
Lopez went on to say he later saw the two "hand-in-hand."
A telling sign of the budding relationship may have been a look Styles shared with his bandmate Niall Horan a week earlier after Horan told PEOPLE his favorite song of 2012 was Swift's "Never Ever Getting Back Together."
When asked if he would ever date Swift, Horan gave a small laugh, looked at Styles and answered with a succinct, "no."
LONDON (AP) — Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.
There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.
Meningitis mainly affects infants and children. It kills about 8 percent of patients and leaves others with lifelong consequences such as brain damage.
In a statement on Friday, Andrin Oswald of Novartis said he is "proud of the major advance" the company has made in developing its vaccine Bexsero. It is aimed at children over two months of age, and Novartis is hoping countries will include the shot among the routine ones for childhood diseases such as measles.
Novartis said the immunization has had side effects such as fever and redness at the injection site.
Recommendations from the European Medicines Agency are usually adopted by the European Commission. Novartis also is seeking to test the vaccine in the U.S.
After the nightmares started, Davien Graham avoided his bicycle.
In his dreams, he pedaled his silver BMX bike through his neighborhood, heard gunfire and died.
If I stay off my bike, I'll be safe, he thought.
He placed it in a backyard shed, where it sat for months. But Jan. 12, 2008, dawned so spectacular that Davien decided to risk it.
He ate Cap'n Crunch Berries cereal, grabbed the bike and rode a half-mile west to Calvary Grace, a Southern Baptist church that was his haven.
Davien lived with an unemployed aunt and uncle, a former Crip, and five other kids in a cramped four-bedroom house in Monrovia, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles.
Yet as a 16-year-old junior at Monrovia High School, Davien earned A's and B's, played JV football and volunteered with the video club. He cleaned the church on Saturdays for minimum wage.
If I live right, God will protect me.
That afternoon, sweaty from cleaning, Davien reached for his wallet to buy a snack — only to realize he had forgotten it at home.
After returning to his house, he caught his reflection in the front window. He was 6 feet 2 and wiry. His skinny chest was beginning to broaden. He was trying to add weight to his 160-pound frame in time for varsity football tryouts.
He showered, told his aunt he would be right back and again jumped on his bike, size-14 Nike Jordans churning, heading for a convenience store near the church.
At the store, he bought Arizona fruit punch and lime chili Lay's potato chips. He recognized a kindergarten-age Latino boy and bought him Twinkies.
Davien pedaled down the empty sidewalk along Peck Road. He could hear kids playing basketball nearby. As he neared the church, a car passed, going in the opposite direction. He barely noticed.
He heard car tires crunching on asphalt behind him. He glanced back, expecting a friend.
An X marks the spot where Davien Graham was shot. (Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
Instead he heard: "Hey, fool."
The gun was gray. It had a slide. Davien recognized that much from watching the Military Channel.
Behind the barrel, he saw forearms braced to fire and the face of a Latino man, a former classmate.
The gunman shouted, "Dirt Rock!," cursing a local black gang, the Duroc Crips.
Davien's mind raced: Don't panic. Watch the barrel. Duck.
Suddenly, he was falling. Then he was on the ground, looking up at the church steeple and the cross.
He heard more shots, but stopped feeling them. A chill crept up his legs.
Davien watched the sedan disappear down the street. He saw the boy he had bought the Twinkies for and other children spilling out of a nearby apartment building.
He was having trouble breathing. He felt sleepy.
He tried to raise his eyelids to see if the shooter was returning. He knew gangsters don't like to leave witnesses.
Davien was raised not to snitch.
He grew up south of the Foothill Freeway and Monrovia's quaint downtown, in a frayed, unincorporated area neighbors call No Man's Land.
The oldest of six children, he learned as a small boy not to feel safe anywhere. He played under the towering pines and sweet gum trees of Pamela Park, where gangbangers stashed guns in bathrooms and addicts left crack pipes in sandboxes.
Davien in an undated school photo. (Courtesy of Davien Graham)
He witnessed his first drive-by when he was 4 years old. He came to recognize the sound, "like a loud drum, a thunderclap."
He grew leery of sedans with tinted windows, "drive-by cars," and gangsters who sprinted past his house and across "the wash," a drainage canal, with police in pursuit.
For Davien's safety, a relative had walked him to school — until he, too, was shot and his body dumped in the wash.
Davien had one goal in mind: to make it to his 21st birthday.
Drug dealers, bookies and hustlers called to him from the streets: "Hey, Day Day! You just like your dad."
The comparison made him cringe. Davien's father, Steven Graham, or Steve-O, was a Crip who pleaded guilty to cocaine possession weeks after Davien was born. Steve-O would spend several years in prison.
Afterward, on days Steve-O got high or drank too much, he would put on his sunglasses and take Davien out to the yard for lessons in manhood, often bringing a shotgun.
Davien's mother, Sharri McGhee, also struggled with drugs.
Even so, when times were good, Davien felt as though he belonged to a normal family. His mother would check them into an Embassy Suites hotel so they could swim in the pool. It felt like Disneyland.
Then he woke up one morning and all his videos and the TV and VCR were gone, and he saw his dad walking home because he had sold the car, too.
The best way to become a man is to look at those around me, and do the opposite.
By the time he started school, Davien had learned not to depend on adults for protection. He saw kids whisked away from their parents by the state, or sent to juvenile hall. He promised his younger brothers he would take care of them.
One day he found his pregnant mother lying on the back patio, convulsing. At the hospital, she delivered a premature baby girl with drugs in her system.
The state intervened. At age 9, Davien, two brothers and the baby were sent to live nearby with his aunt and uncle, Joni and Terry Alford, and their two children. Davien thought they acted more like big kids than parents.
The best way to become a man is to look at those around me, and do the opposite.
On Jan. 30, 2007, as Davien and his uncle walked in the neighborhood, they spotted a group of Latino men approaching, heads shaved gangbanger-style, arms covered in tattoos.
Suddenly, everyone was shouting in English and Spanish. Someone fired a gun.
His uncle stumbled off, shot in the calf.
Davien ran, hiding under a low brick garden wall. He could hear the strangers searching for him, their breath close. He wondered where his uncle had gone.
After they left, he bolted home, arriving to see paramedics lift his uncle into an ambulance. Sheriff's deputies followed.
His uncle answered some of their questions. But he never identified the shooter. He wasn't a snitch.
Deputies questioned Davien too. He knew he was supposed to tell the truth, as a Christian. But helping deputies would put his family at risk.
He didn't describe the suspects. No one was arrested.
Davien soon began having the nightmares about getting shot on the silver BMX his uncle had given him.
As Davien lay bleeding on the grass, he played dead.
Through droopy eyelids, he watched cars brake for a stop sign across the street, then zoom off. He recognized one driver, a neighbor who looked away.
She must think I'm a gangster.
A red Ford Explorer slowed, windows rolled down. Davien took a chance.
"Ma'am, I need help, I've been shot!" he yelled.
The car stopped and a white lady with long red hair and glasses jumped out. She grabbed Davien's hand and called 911.
A bullet recovered by a surgeon from Davien’s body was later introduced into evidence. (Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
It was 4:57 p.m.
"There is a young African American gentleman who has been shot," the woman told dispatch. "There's a lot of children out here as well, if you can kind of hurry."
Davien groped for the cellphone in his pocket just as it started to vibrate.
It was his aunt. She and his uncle had been out on the front stoop and thought they heard gunfire.
"They shot me," Davien said. He hung up so his aunt could call 911.
His uncle soon pulled up in the family's white SUV. He cradled Davien's body.
"I can't move my legs!" Davien cried, loud enough for the 911 operator to hear.
His uncle grabbed the church's water hose and held it to Davien's lips. Davien stared up at Calvary Grace.
I don't want to die.
He felt himself passing out, eyes rolling back into his head. He gripped the grass beneath him. His uncle was shouting his nickname.
"Day Day, come on!"
Paramedics arrived and loaded Davien into an ambulance. Just then his aunt rushed up. She was an imposing figure, heavyset, with tattoos and a deep voice. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies stopped her.
Had Davien belonged to a gang, they asked?
His aunt pointed to the church. Go ask somebody in there, she said as she climbed into the ambulance. Church folks would set them straight, she figured.
A block away at the convenience store, a witness called 911. She told the operator she saw three or four people flee in a black Nissan.
“I heard the pop, pop, pop… I didn’t want them to see I saw them.”
—Witness
"I heard the pop, pop, pop. I turned, I didn't want to look at the vehicle, I didn't want them to see I saw them."
"Did you actually see them do it?" the operator said.
"Yes, I did."
"Are you going to talk to deputies?"
She paused.
"I'm a little concerned," she said, her voice quavering. "I'm a little bit worried, too, for my safety and for my kids…"
By the time detectives interviewed her, the woman insisted she had not seen the shooter.
That left Davien as the only witness.
Davien awoke in intensive care. He didn't know what day it was. He couldn't tell if the sun was rising or setting.
A thick zipper of a scar sealed his chest. A tube jutted from his stomach, another from his arm. A ventilator covered his mouth, making a Darth Vader sound. He had trouble staying awake.
Below his waist, he felt nothing.
Doctors told him he was at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, listed under a fake name as a precaution. He had been shot twice, in the left flank and right buttock. One bullet lodged in his ribs, another splintered.
Surgeons had labored for five hours to patch his left lung, remove his left kidney and his spleen. They could do nothing to repair his L1 vertebra. His legs were paralyzed.
A nurse brought pad and pen. Davien wanted to tell his family about the shooting. He had recognized the shooter, but he was too scared to write down a name.
Instead, he scribbled: "I forgive them."
Days later, Sheriff's Det. Scott Schulze showed up at Davien's bedside with a series of mug shots.
Davien spotted the shooter immediately. Jimmy Santana had taken gym classes with him in middle school and later joined a Latino gang, Monrovia Nuevo Varrio, or MNV.
The detective asked Davien if the shooter was among the photos.
Davien feared what could happen if he snitched. He also believed as a Christian that it was wrong to lie.
He circled Santana's photo. Beside it he wrote: "It's him."
He was scared. And not just for himself.
Davien's younger brothers looked a lot like him.
Seventeen days after the shooting, on Jan. 29, 2008, deputies arrested Santana at his mother's house in Duarte. He would stay in jail until a preliminary hearing to determine if he should stand trial.
Investigators believed Davien was the victim of a 17-month war between black and Latino gangs, dating to a night when Latino gang members went gunning for Vincent Minor, a black Duroc Crip associate.
About 10 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2006, suspected members of Duarte Eastside, a Latino gang, arrived at Minor's ranch house.
The gang sprayed the house with bullets from a 9mm handgun. One pierced a converted garage, killing Minor's father, 54-year-old Michael Minor, who volunteered as a youth football coach.
Payback came within hours.
Three outraged Duroc Crips spied a Duarte Eastside gang member, Marcus Maturino, sipping a beer outside a house on Shrode Avenue, less than a mile from the first shooting.
The Crips fired with a .45 and a TEC-9 handgun. They missed.
Standing nearby was Nicole Kaster, an aspiring gym teacher. A bullet struck her in the face, killing her. She was 22.
Tit-for-tat retaliation followed — with 71 gang-related shootings by the end of 2007. Investigators struggled to make arrests. Witnesses disappeared, changed their stories or clammed up.
In June 2007, members of Monrovia Nuevo Varrio strode up to a black crowd at a park and opened fire, wounding one person.
Police arrested Santana and charged him with four counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. Later, a judge dismissed that case against him for lack of evidence.
Santana, 18, lived at home with his mother and older brother, a gang associate. Santana had been nicknamed Lil Tuffy by the gang and inducted into a clique called the Pee Wee Locos. On a bedroom wall, he had tacked an ode: "Enemies run from me, they're all cowards, because I'm the shot caller with lots of power."
On Dec. 12, a month before Davien was shot, two black men shot and killed 24-year-old Hector Acosta as he rode his motorcycle on Millbrae Avenue in Duarte. Acosta wasn't a gang member.
Everyone knew what would come next: MNV would retaliate. This time, they would send a gangster who knew how to hit a target and could be trusted not to talk if he got caught.
Davien was in the hospital for eight weeks, undergoing multiple surgeries. He tried to puzzle out why God let him get shot.
His faith wavered. He began to doubt the wisdom of testifying against Santana.
On March 14, 2008, two months after the shooting, Davien was discharged. He returned to his aunt and uncle's house in a wheelchair.
He was a wisp of his former self, 70 pounds lighter. Bones in his toes were brittle; doctors warned that if he ran into something in the chair, they could shatter.
In the weeks after he was shot, Davien was treated at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, where he underwent physical therapy as he adjusted to life in a wheelchair. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
Surgeons had removed the bullet from his ribs, but they could do nothing about the fragments near his spine. Hot fingers of pain yanked him awake at night, tugging the breath out of him.
God, give me just five minutes without it.
Davien was scheduled to testify at Santana's preliminary hearing four days after being released from the hospital.
He couldn't decide what to do. He worried that every approaching car might bring another drive-by. In a wheelchair, it would be hard to flee.
Relatives offered little help. Some were scared of being attacked; others were bent on revenge. Few trusted the police.
Davien returned to church looking for answers. On Palm Sunday, two days before Santana's hearing, he entered the sanctuary with his aunt and uncle.
He tried to listen to the sermon but he couldn't concentrate. His spine was throbbing again.
His uncle wheeled him out to the church parking lot.
You need to face your fear, his uncle said.
He started pushing Davien toward the front of the church, the site of the shooting.
His aunt joined them, followed by the pastor's wife.
They crept forward. When they reached the sidewalk, their pace turned glacial.
"OK to go further?" his uncle asked.
Davien’s uncle, Terry Alford, wheels him back to the scene of the shooting, urging him to confront his fears. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
Davien reluctantly nodded.
His aunt sobbed. The pastor's wife held her.
Staring down that barren road, walled off by backyard fences, Davien saw himself back on the grass, bleeding.
He knew three people who had been gunned down in the Monrovia area since he was shot: a 16-year-old girl killed next to the church, a 19-year-old former Duarte High School football player and a 64-year-old man. None was a gang member.
If Santana could shoot me here, he thought, he could shoot anyone anywhere.
Davien couldn't stand. But he could stand up.
"OK," he told his uncle. "I'm straight."
PART 2
Making peace
Making peace
A whirring mechanical lift raised Davien Graham’s wheelchair to the witness stand in Department Four on the third floor of the Los Angeles County courthouse in Alhambra.
Pain burned at the base of Davien’s spine. Then his eyes met Jimmy Santana’s for the first time since the shooting.
He thought Santana seemed much smaller sitting at the defense table than he with the gun in his hand. In his baggy blue jail uniform, he looked like a child, Davien thought.
Two months earlier, on Jan. 12, 2008, Davien had been gunned down as he rode his bike in front of his church, an innocent victim of a gang war that had raged in Monrovia for two years.
He recognized Santana as the shooter who fired from the car. They had gone to school together. Raised by a father and then an uncle who both were Crips, Davien learned that victims and witnesses don’t snitch—they don’t identify their attackers.
But he had shunned gang life for a Christian life, and he believed that Christians don’t lie. So when asked by detectives, he had circled Santana’s photo in a lineup of mug shots.
Now he was being asked to set aside fears of retaliation and testify in open court.
Staring at Santana, Davien said the first thing he remembered saying after the shooting was, “I forgive the person who did this to me.”
Santana stared back, appearing unmoved.
Sitting in his wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, Davien could see Santana’s mother in the gallery, a small woman with a strained face. A group of young people lounged behind her.
Maybe they were in the car with Jimmy that day.
The prosecutor asked a question, addressing Davien as John Doe, a well-meaning effort to protect his identity. It didn’t matter. Everyone in the room knew Davien.
“Do you see the man who shot you here in court today?”
“On the right side of the courtroom, and he’s wearing a blue uniform,” Davien said.
That was all the judge needed to hear. He ordered Santana to stand trial. Davien was free to go.
But he didn’t feel free.
They must think I’m a gangster and was shot as payback.
Sheriff’s investigators said he wasn’t at risk, and his family didn’t need protection. But he didn’t trust the sheriff’s department. The sheriff had sent a task force to Monrovia to stop the gang violence. They dropped warnings at gangsters’ homes.
His uncle got one. So did Davien.
That upset him. Unlike his uncle, Davien had never joined a gang.
They must think I’m a gangster and was shot as payback.
As Davien left court, the judge ordered two deputies to escort Davien to the parking lot, just in case.
Davien knew his biggest hurdle lay ahead, testifying at Santana’s trial.
As the case dragged on, Davien felt like he was doing time, waiting. He began to believe that his aunt and uncle, Joni and Terry Alford, resented him hanging around, especially when he bumped into their furniture or peed in his shabby wheelchair.
They didn’t seem to fear for his safety. Sometimes when they ran errands, they would leave him alone in the car, feeling trapped and exposed.
Davien wanted to put the trial behind him. He wanted out of Monrovia. He decided his way out was to finish high school and go to college.
It took months for Davien to regain strength. He returned to Monrovia High for his senior year. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
In September, he returned to Monrovia High and, back among his friends, he thrived. He almost forgot about the trial. Then one day some guys drove by his house, shouting threats. It wasn’t clear if the message was meant for Davien or for his uncle.
Sometime later, Davien was called to the principal’s office. Sheriff’s deputies were waiting. They told him a message intercepted at the county jail, written in gang code, appeared to say he had been targeted.
We’re taking you home to grab some things, deputies said. You can stay in school, but not with your family. You’re being relocated.
Back at the house, his aunt watched him pack. Deputies could not say where he was going, or for how long.
“It’s messed up,” Davien said, trembling. “Not only did he take my legs away from me, now he’s trying to take my whole life.”
Deputies took Davien to stay with a teacher who the officers knew.
Davien felt safer. But he still worried, especially about his brothers at home. One of them had started working at Calvary Grace, the church where Davien had been shot.
Over the next three years, as the sheriff’s task force tamped down the gang war, Davien’s case passed to a new public defender, a new prosecutor and six different judges.
Davien graduated from high school and moved far from Monrovia to attend a four-year college. He learned to get around in his wheelchair, and had more surgeries than he could remember to deal with the bullet fragments left inside his body.
One day last fall, as he was preparing for mid-terms, Davien arrived at his apartment to find a sheriff’s detective and deputies waiting. The trial was starting Jan. 26, 2012. They handed him a subpoena, and it didn’t sit well.
He had agreed to testify. Why were they acting like they had to force him, surprising him at his apartment with his friends?
He called the new prosecutor on his case. He didn’t trust her, so he recorded the call. He asked why she hadn’t come to see him herself and why she sent deputies when she knew he had agreed to show up.
He hung up feeling like he was heading to court without anyone on his side.
Davien could feel jurors’ eyes crawling over his face. He stared ahead, focusing on the prosecutor, just as Schulze had recommended.
Davien, by then 20, shifted in his wheelchair on the stand, looking down at the gallery. He recognized Santana’s mother. She and another son testified that Santana was home with them at the time of the shooting. It was their word against Davien’s. No other witnesses were willing to testify.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Det. Scott Schulze, whom Davien had come to trust, escorts him into court as he prepares to testify. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
No one from Davien’s family was there. He didn’t tell them about the trial because he didn’t want to put them at risk if gang members showed up.
He tried to clear his throat, his mouth was dry. In a court system handling more than 1800 attempted murder cases at the time, he felt lost.
He hoped the jurors could read him, the way parents read a child. Jurors needed to see that he was no gangster. He just happened to be young and black and in the wrong place.
Surely the lone black juror, a woman staring at him from the front row, would understand.
Santana, 23, sat 15 feet away, slouching into a baggy dress shirt.
The prosecutor asked him to demonstrate how his attacker pointed the gun.
Davien extended his willowy arms, clasping his hands in the shape of a pistol. He winced. His back ached every time he bent his 6-foot 4-inch frame to the microphone.
“Where was it being pointed?” the prosecutor asked.
“At my face.”
He could feel sweat spreading under his arms, wilting the new button-down shirt bought at Target for the trial.
“Did you see anyone in the car?” she asked.
“I saw a driver and a passenger,” Davien said, without looking at Santana.
“Did you know who said ‘Hey fool’?”
“The passenger,” he said.
“Did you get a look at the passenger?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Now Davien glanced at Santana. The accused was biting his shadow of a mustache.
“Did you see his face?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you look around the court and see if the person is here?”
Davien did not hesitate.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Candace J. Beason looks at Jimmy Santana as Davien points at him and explains that Santana shot him. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times)
“Yes, ma’am,” Davien said, “He is sitting next to his lawyer in a collared shirt.”
“How confident were you that he was the person?”
“One hundred percent.”
Not long afterward, Santana’s public defender stood. Davien had once imagined himself looking just like that lawyer: a black man standing tall in an elegant suit.
What was the name of your uncle’s former gang, the lawyer asked.
Davien frowned. “I don’t recall.”
“You don’t recall what gang?”
The prosecutor objected. The judge overruled her. Davien had to answer the question.
“He was a Crip,” Davien said.
Jurors shifted in their seats. Davien feared they were souring on him. They didn’t know how hard he had tried to live right.
They think I got shot for a reason.
At 3:50 p.m. on Feb. 2, after six hours of deliberation, a buzzer sounded signaling a verdict.
The bailiff brought Santana into the courtroom. His mother bowed her head and grasped the hand of her other son, praying in a whisper of Spanish, “Let it be just.”
Four more bailiffs slipped into the courtroom for security.
As the clerk read the verdict, Santana shook his head.
Jimmy Santana reacts to the jury's verdict: guilty on all counts. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
Guilty on all counts, including willful, deliberate and premeditated attempted murder.
Santana sobbed, curling into himself. He was soon joined by his weeping mother.
Jurors filed out, eyes darting, avoiding the Santanas and searching for the polite young man in the wheelchair who they would later say they believed from the moment he took the stand.
But Davien had gone back to school.
He would later send a statement for the prosecutor to be read to Santana at his sentencing in June.
The shooting broke him, Davien wrote. But he managed to recover and start a new life.
“I hope that you can become a better person during this whole experience,” he wrote to Santana. “Life does not end here for you. You can still do good to the world.”
Santana and his family declined to be interviewed for this article. He was sentenced to 40 years to life.
The next month, on March 17, 2012, Davien was surrounded by a crowd at his apartment. It was his birthday. He had fulfilled his childhood dream: survive to age 21.
Davien belted out a rap song he had composed.
“What do you see when you look in the mirror? Does it fade away or all get clearer?”
Davien’s father, Steven Graham, or Steve-O, was in the crowd. Steve-O had straightened out. Davien made peace with him and his mother—but as friends, not as parents. He had been his own parent for a long time.
He had accepted life in a wheelchair.
School can take me places that walking can’t.
He had fulfilled his childhood dream: Survive to age 21.
Davien, finishing his third year of college, plans to graduate with a degree in video production.
He has a five-year plan, which includes self-producing two rap albums from his mix tapes: “Musical Chair” and “Ramps and Elevators.”
He also plans a clothing line featuring a stylized handicapped logo, an after-school program for at-risk youth and a screenplay titled, “Where there’s wheels, there’s a way.”
At the party, his girlfriend presented a marble sheet decorated with his planned album cover: a photo of Davien in his wheelchair.
“It’s not every day a young man turns 21,” his father said. “You’re grown for the rest of your life—don’t turn back.”
He handed Davien a flute of pink champagne. Davien sipped slowly. Leaning forward to blow out his candles, he made a wish.
Smoke rose over Gaza on Friday. Israel denied launching airstrikes. More Photos »
GAZA CITY — Egypt launched a remarkable diplomatic initiative on Friday after a night of ferocious Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and militant rocket fire toward Israel, sending its prime minister to show support for Palestinians in the beleaguered enclave. The move prompted Israel to agree to a temporary, though flawed, cease-fire even as it sent armored vehicles toward Gaza and called up reservists for a possible invasion.
The frail truce barely took root. Even as Prime Minister Hesham Kandil of Egypt arrived in Gaza, Israel Radio said Palestinian militants fired 25 rockets into southern Israel, with one rocket striking a house There were no immediate reports of casualties.
What sounded like airstrikes by Israeli F-16s were also audible in Gaza City. The Israeli military said no such strikes had taken place, but the Hamas health ministry reported that two people, including a child, were killed in the north of Gaza City while the Egyptian delegation was on the ground, pushing the Palestinian death toll in three days of aerial bombardment to 21.
Three Israelis were killed in a rocket attack on Thursday in Kiryat Malachi, a small town in southern Israel, when a rocket fired from Gaza struck their apartment house.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made the temporary cease-fire by Israel’s airplanes conditional on a corresponding halt to rocket fire from Gaza. Mr. Kandil’s visit produced dramatic imagery to underpin Cairo’s support for Hamas, which Israel, the United States and much of the West consider to be a terrorist organization.
Mr. Kandil and Ismail Haniya, his Hamas equivalent, visited the Al Shifa hospital amid a huge scrum of bodyguards and journalists, saying they had carried the body of Mohammed Yasser, one of eight children who Palestinian health officials say have been killed in the surge of violence since a top Hamas commander was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.
“This is the blood of our children on our clothes,” Mr. Haniyeh said as he showed spatters on his clothing, “These are the Egyptian and the Palestinian blood united together.”
Like President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt on Thursday, Mr. Kandil walked a delicate line between support for Hamas, condemnation of Israel and a quest for calm in a region increasingly threatened by the spillovers from Syria’s civil war into neighboring countries as well as by the long-festering impasse between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The aim of this visit is not only to show political support but to support the Palestinian people on the ground,” Mr. Kandil said, noting that he had brought with him a delegation from the Egyptian Health Ministry. He said a cease-fire between Gaza and Israel was “the only way to achieve stability in the region” and also called on the Palestinians to repair the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah group that dominates the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “We call on the Palestinian people to unite because their power and strength is in their unity,” Mr. Kandil said. “That’s the only way to liberate Palestine.”
The visit was the first of such a high-ranking Egyptian official to this coastal enclave since the militant Hamas faction gained control in 2007 and offered a potent sign of how Egypt’s revolution and new Islamist leadership since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubakrak last year has shifted the geopolitics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Egypt, Mr. Kandil said, would “save nothing to stop the aggression and achieve a continuous cease-fire on the way to having a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
The display of support — improbable throughout the Mubarak era — emboldened the Hamas leadership.
“The time in which the Israeli occupation does whatever it wants in Gaza is gone,” Mr. Haniyeh said. “Egypt cannot accept the aggression as before,” Mr. Haniyeh said. “I welcome Egypt for this historical visit that comes in harmony with the will of the free Egypt.” Before the visit, residents in Gaza said the night was filled with the boom and crash of airstrikes, with loud explosions at dawn on Friday, a day after Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza brushed aside international calls for restraint and escalated their lethal conflict. In Gaza, Palestinian militants launched hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, targeting Tel Aviv for the first time, and Israel intensified its aerial assaults.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel, expressing outrage over a pair of long-range Palestinian rockets that whizzed toward Tel Aviv and set off the first air-raid warning in the Israeli metropolis since it was threatened by Iraqi Scud missiles in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, said, “There will be a price for that escalation that the other side will have to pay.”
Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza City, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram from Gaza, Rick Gladstone from New York, Rina Castelnuovo from Kiryat Malachi, Israel, Mayy El Sheikh and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Gabby Sobelman from Jerusalem, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Bangkok.
