From: N.Y. Times

TEL AVIV — Senior Israeli officials said Thursday that they would no longer stop all Palestinians who had foreign study grants from leaving Gaza, and would look favorably upon their applications for exit permits. The move departs from the near total Israeli ban on movement out of Gaza, the Hamas-controlled coastal strip, since late 2007.

The officials said the decision had been made by Defense Minister Ehud Barak in the aftermath of the embarrassing misunderstanding with the American State Department last week that resulted in the cancellation of Fulbright grants to Gaza and then a hurried reinstatement of them. The officials, from the Defense Ministry, spoke on the condition that they not be identified by name. “We are going to let out students, but in limited numbers,” one senior official said. “We’re not talking about hundreds.”

He said that Israel’s policy was caught between two aims: to weaken Hamas, the anti-Israel militia that took full control of Gaza one year ago, by imposing a siege on its territory, and to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe there. That means allowing the entry of 70 truckloads of crucial supplies every day and letting out hundreds of emergency medical cases, but almost nothing else.

But, he said, because Israel hopes in the future to have a neighbor that is less poor and better educated, encouraging some study grants abroad is very much in Israel’s interest. The population of Gaza is about 1.5 million.

The grants that will be honored include not only American ones like the Fulbright and specific university scholarships, but also those from many countries in Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf. It seemed likely that some students would be permitted to cross out of southern Gaza through Egypt, while others would go through the crossing into Israel.

But the central policy of closing Gaza remains in place. After the Hamas takeover, the Israeli government decided it no longer wanted responsibility for Gaza, so the Defense Ministry’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Yosef Mishlev, was instructed to reject exit requests except urgent medical ones.

Still, when Secretary of State Rice read last Friday of the cancellation of the Fulbright grants, she told her lieutenants to get the Israelis to let the grant recipients out and to reinstate the scholarships, and that is now happening.

On Wednesday, an American Consulate car picked up four of the seven Fulbright scholars from the Gaza border to take them for visa interviews in Jerusalem, the first formal step in their journey to advanced study in the United States. The other three were still being checked by the Shin Bet internal security service.

Lower-level State Department officials had apparently assumed that the new stricter closing of Gaza would make it impossible to get the students out, so the officials canceled their grants. They said their exit permit requests for the students were not answered. But Israeli officials said the Americans had failed to draw their attention to the requests as worthy of exception and expediting.

Now, the ministry will pursue a modified policy whereby all Gazans with grants to study abroad will submit their names for clearance to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which also opposes Hamas. Then the names will go to General Mishlev, who will try to move their applications forward for exit permits.

Human rights groups that disapprove of Israel’s restrictive policy toward Gaza say hundreds of Gazans want to study abroad. But the Israeli officials said repeatedly that those leaving would be limited in number.