There was no middle ground in reactions to the Haifa District Court ruling Aug. 28 rejecting a lawsuit brought by the parents of Rachel Corrie, a US Palestine solidarity activist crushed to death by an army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003. Israeli officials are welcoming the ruling as a long-due exoneration, while the Corrie family and their attorney denounced it as a "black day for human rights." Attorney Hussein Abu-Hussein said that the ruling showed that there was injustice across the Israeli legal system. At a press conference, he displayed photographs which had been presented in court, and which he said proved that the bulldozer operator must have seen Corrie. He also said the photos disproved the court's finding that the bulldozers were active, but not demolishing homes at the time of the incident. Hussein also argued that there was no basis for applying the "combatant activities" exception in the case, because there was no battle going on at the time of Rachel's death.

Hamas security forces on Aug. 15 arrested a senior Salafi sheikh who was injured in an Israeli airstrike in June . Sheikh Abu Suhaib Rashwan was detained as he left a hospital, where he was recovering from wounds sustained in the June 20 airstrike in Rafah. The missile strike on a motorcycle wounded Rashwan and a companion, Ghaleb Ermilat, who the IDF described as a "global jihad operative." Israel accused the two of being behind an ambush along the Egyptian border two days earlier that killed an Israeli civilian, and said they were members of Tawhid wal Jihad, a "global jihad terror movement that is responsible for ongoing terror attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers."

Reacting to the Aug. 5 armed attack on an Egyptian military post near the Rafah crossing on the border with the Gaza Strip, the Muslim Brotherhood website that the attack "can be attributed to Mossad," Israel's foreign intelligence service. Read the statement: "Evidently, this crime may well be the work of Israel's Mossad, which has sought to abort the revolution ever since its launch, and which issued instructions to Israeli citizens in Sinai to leave immediately, just days ago. It is clearly noticeable that every time a warning like this is issued, a terrorist incident takes place in the Sinai." More than 15 Egyptian soldiers and border guards were killed in the night attack, and the assailants reportedly seized two armored personnel carriers. The militants briefly penetrated Israeli territory, before their vehicle was shelled by an Israeli air force helicopter. A statement on the Israeli Defense Forces website said the attack was carried out by "global jihadists"—a term the IDF uses to describe members of Salafist groups linked to al-Qaeda's network in the region.