WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration promised direct financial aid Monday to a new West Bank-based Palestinian government that is amenable to peace with Israel, while offering indirect humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza following the territory's takeover by the militant Hamas organization...

Five years to the week after Bush articulated a goal of a "two-state solution" for Israelis and Palestinians, the hostile takeover of Gaza by Hamas, which the White House calls a terrorist organization and which rejects Israel's right to exist, poses the toughest obstacle yet.

After a tumultuous weekend in which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas moved to establish a new government in the West Bank, the White House acted to bolster Abbas, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announcing the U.S. will release up to $86 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority that had been frozen after Hamas gained control of the Palestinian parliament in elections last year...

Bush and [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert believe the tenuous Abbas-led government in the West Bank holds the best prospect for a peaceful resolution of a deepening Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the same time, experts said, the U.S. cannot simply abandon the Palestinians isolated within Hamas-run Gaza...

Ghaith al-Omari, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation who was a political adviser to Abbas, predicted that Hamas, faced now with the responsibility of governing Gaza, "will fail." At the same time, he said, "No Palestinian leader can sit back and watch Gaza starve." And, he said, Bush and Olmert must reject any "assumption that we can separate the West Bank and Gaza..."

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