About half of the Jewish settlers to be uprooted from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank this summer are in talks with the Israeli government about moving, defying calls by their leaders to oppose the plan at all costs, officials said today.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is considering delaying the Gaza pullout until mid-August, after the completion of a three-week Jewish mourning period that marks the destruction of the two biblical temples, Israeli officials said today.

Israeli deputy prime minister Shimon Peres said today the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas is on the right track, despite last week’s Tel Aviv suicide bombing and other attempts by Palestinian militants to torpedo a fragile truce.

Residents of a small Jewish settlement said today they have reached a deal to move together to a village inside Israel – the first community to agree to be evacuated under the government’s Gaza withdrawal plan.

A Parmalat employee who had been questioned in the Italian company’s fraud scandal died in an apparent suicide after he jumped off a bridge into a river, officials said.