American consular officials drove from Jerusalem to the Gazan border on Thursday in an unusual effort to interview three Gazan Fulbright scholars who Israel says are too dangerous to allow into the country.
Using a portable fingerprinting machine flown in from Washington for the interviews, the Americans were seeking to expedite the granting of study visas to the three scholars, despite Israeli concerns.
The scholars, all former students or teaching assistants at the Islamic University of Gaza, a stronghold of the radical Hamas group that runs Gaza, were among seven winners of Fulbright grants in the territory. In May, the State Department, which sponsors the program, told all the scholars that their awards were canceled because Israel would not permit them to leave Gaza.
But after word of the cancellations spread, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated publicly that the Fulbright program was a vital part of American policy, and the awards were reinstated. Israeli officials then agreed to carry out security checks on the seven Gazans, granting four of them the permits needed to travel to the American Consulate in Jerusalem. The other three, however, were determined to have links to Hamas, which Israel and the United States regard as a terrorist group.
American officials who asked for the details of those links were given only general statements about family ties. The officials decided to find a way to get the students out — thus the drive to Gaza. “It is certainly not the norm,” Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said in Washington.
After Hamas took control of Gaza last year, Israel closed off the territory, barring virtually everyone from leaving except in a medical emergency. Egypt has agreed to Israel’s policy, meaning its border with Gaza has also remained mostly shut.
If the three Fulbright scholars — Zuhair Abu Shaaban, Fidaa Abed and Osama Daoud — do not raise alarms in their State Department vetting in the coming days, the American Consulate will grant them visas and press Israel to allow them to go to the border between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan to fly to the United States to pursue graduate degrees in engineering and computer science.
As a result of the attention to the Fulbright controversy, Israel has announced a slight change in its policy, saying that it will be open to letting more Gazan students with foreign study grants leave. In recent weeks, a few have been let out.
Israel’s closing of Gaza was supposed to ease gradually as part of a truce with Hamas, which included an end to rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. But there have been numerous violations of the truce from Gaza, by small militias that Hamas has been unable to rein in. And the closing has, in some ways, toughened in recent days as Israel responded to the violations by closing the crossings to goods.
On Thursday, Israeli soldiers killed an 18-year-old militant of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, loosely affiliated with the Fatah movement. The militant approached the border fence and tried to enter Israel, refusing to stop after warning shots were fired. He was the first fatality since the truce was agreed on last month.
Aksa militants responded by firing two rockets at the Negev Desert in Israel. Hamas, which says it is committed to the truce, then arrested three Aksa members in connection with the rocket attack. They were the first arrests Hamas has made in its effort to make all militias accept the truce.
In the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is officially in charge but where Israel maintains a strong military presence, Israeli troops continued to close Hamas businesses and institutions in an effort to weaken the group’s social and financial roots.
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