Gaza - A team of United Nations experts is to visit the Gaza Strip on May 11 to investigate environmental damage left by an Israeli offensive earlier in the year, a UN official said Tuesday.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said he found poor conditions iwhen he made a preliminary visit to the Palestinian territory.

A major result of the massive Israeli incursion was ongoing difficulties in water provision as well as sewage removal, he said.

Gaza City - The radical Palestinian Islamic Hamas movement ruling the Gaza Strip charged Monday that countries' boycotting the UN conference on racism in Geneva were caving in to US and Israeli pressure.

"Those countries were quick to respond to the Zionist (reference to Israel) and American pressure and extortion against their leaders," Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas' spokesman, told reporters in Gaza City.

Gaza City - Egypt opened its border with the Gaza Strip on Saturday for limited numbers of humanitarian cases, a Hamas spokesman said.

The spokesman, Adel Zourob, added that the Rafah crossing point will be open for two days for patients, students and Palestinians who are holders of residency permits in other countries.

The names of the individuals who would be allowed to leave Gaza appeared on the website of Hamas' interior ministry. The militant Islamist movement is in control of the Gaza Strip.

Ramallah - US President Barack Obama's envoy to the Middle East was due in Ramallah Friday to hear the Palestinians' position on renewing peace negotiations with the new Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

George Mitchell, who held his first talks in Israel Thursday since the government was sworn in, was to travel the short distance from Jerusalem to the central West Bank city for talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and acting Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Abbas has said Netanyahu must openly endorse the two-state solution to the Middle East conflict for him to be a peace partner.

Tel Aviv - A knife-wielding Palestinian infiltrated a Jewish settlement on the southern West Bank Friday morning and was shot dead by a Jewish settler, the Israeli military said.

A spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said the Palestinian had infiltrated the settlement of Beit Hagai, south of Hebron, with the aim of carrying out an attack.

She said the Jewish settler who had shot him was lightly injured by the knife.

Riyadh - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrived in Riyadh on Sunday for a one-day visit to discuss with Saudi King Abdullah ways to deal with the new Israeli government, diplomatic sources said. Abbas will coordinate with the Saudi monarch a strategy to approach the new right-wing government under Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejects a "two-state solution" to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, diplomatic sources in the Palestinian embassy in Riyadh told the German Press Agency dpa.