CAIRO (AP) — Israel and Hamas agreed to extend a temporary cease-fire for five days, Egyptian and Palestinian officials announced Wednesday, potentially averting renewed violence and permitting the sides to continue to negotiate a substantive deal to end the war in Gaza.

Yet even as the extension was announced just minutes before a previous truce was set to expire at midnight, violence spiked, with Palestinian militants firing five rockets at Israel and Israel targeting sites across the Gaza Strip in response. It was not clear if the fighting was isolated or might shatter the truce.

Egypt's foreign ministry and the head of the Palestinian negotiating team announced the extension, which began at midnight local time. A spokesman for Israel's prime minister had no immediate comment.

The cease-fire extension is meant to grant both sides additional time to negotiate a longer-term truce and a roadmap for the coastal territory.

"We have agreed on a cease-fire for five days," said Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of the Palestinian delegation to the Cairo talks. He noted that there had been "significant progress" but that disagreements remained over the wording regarding security arrangements, reconstruction efforts for the Gaza Strip and the permissible fishing area.

The lull in violence had been a welcome reprieve for Israelis and Palestinians living in Gaza. During the temporary cease-fire, Israel halted military operations in the war-battered coastal territory and Gaza militants stopped firing rockets, aside from the ones late Wednesday.

The two sides were considering an Egyptian proposal that partially addresses their demands, but deep differences have kept the deal in doubt.

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Israeli soldiers keep guard during a protest by Palestinians against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, …

Hamas is seeking an end to a crippling blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt in 2007. The blockade has greatly limited the movement of Palestinians in and out of the territory of 1.8 million people. It has also restricted the flow of goods into Gaza and blocked virtually all exports.

Israel says the closure is necessary to prevent arms smuggling, and officials are reluctant to make any concessions that would allow Hamas to declare victory.

Israel wants Hamas to disarm, or at least be prevented from re-arming. Hamas has recovered from previous rounds of violence with Israel, including a major three-week ground operation in January 2009 and another weeklong air offensive in 2012. It now controls an arsenal of thousands of rockets, some with long ranges and powerful. Gaza militants fired more than 3,000 rockets toward Israel during the war.

Neither side is likely to see all of its demands met, but the Egyptian proposal tabled Tuesday offered some solutions. A member of the Palestinian delegation at the Cairo talks said the proposal calls for easing parts of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, bringing some relief to the territory.

The proposal leaves the key areas of disagreement, including Hamas' demand for a full lifting of the blockade and Israeli calls for Hamas to disarm, to later negotiations.

The Palestinian negotiator said he had some reservations about the proposal and would try to improve it.

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An Israeli army reservist officer, back on camera, wearing a T-shirt referring to the Israeli forces …

"We would like to see more cross-border freedom, and also to have the question of a Gaza seaport and airport discussed," he said.

The Palestinian official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss negotiations with journalists.

As the talks continued, Hamas indicated it was sticking to its demands.

In recorded remarks broadcast on Hamas radio Wednesday, Ismail Haniyeh, the top Hamas leader in Gaza, said that "achieving a permanent truce can come only through lifting the blockade on Gaza."

Israel, meanwhile, signaled it was ready to respond to renewed fire from Gaza following the end of the cease-fire.

"We will continue to defend, continue to operate. We will be ready for any effort, any way, at any time," Israel's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, told reporters.

Amid the cease-fire, an Associated Press video journalist and a freelance Palestinian translator working with him were killed Wednesday when ordnance left over from the war exploded as they reported on the conflict's aftermath.

Simone Camilli, a 35-year-old Italian, and Ali Shehda Abu Afash, 36, died when an unexploded missile believed to have been dropped in an Israeli airstrike blew up as Gaza police engineers worked to neutralize it in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. Four police engineers also were killed. Three other people, including AP photographer Hatem Moussa, were badly wounded.

The war began on July 8 with Israel's air campaign against Gaza's Hamas rulers, whom Israel blamed for the kidnapping and murder in June of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Nine days later, Israel sent in ground troops to destroy Hamas' underground cross-border tunnels constructed for attacks inside Israel.

The fighting has so far killed more than 1,900 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, Palestinian and U.N. officials say. On the Israeli side, 67 people have died, all but three of them soldiers.

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Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.

By Nick Carey and Carey Gillam

FERGUSON Mo. (Reuters) - The police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri, was injured in the incident that has sparked racially charged protests, the city's police chief said on Wednesday.

Police Chief Thomas Jackson told a news conference the unidentified officer was treated at a hospital for swelling on the side of his face, one of the few details released about events surrounding the Saturday night shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

After three nights of tense standoffs between protesters and heavily armed police - and instances of violence and looting - Jackson urged demonstrators to rally only during daylight hours.

He said it was not a curfew and said that protesters could get their point across with peaceful demonstrations.

In protests on Wednesday in the St. Louis suburb, about 150 demonstrators marched chanting "hands up, don't shoot" and carried signs including "Mike did not have to die."

Angry Protesters Continue to Clash With Police in …Play Video

A handful of police in riot gear were in place at the end of the march. Police from neighboring districts have been brought in to reinforce the Ferguson police department.

Jackson said he could not release any more information on the shooting because witness statements were still coming in.

What police have said is that the shooting followed a struggle between the officer and Brown.

But that, along with much else about the incident, is a matter of dispute. A witness who was walking with Brown at the time has said in media interviews that Brown put his hands in the air and was not struggling with the officer. He said the officer fired multiple times into Brown's head and chest.

The witness, Dorian Johnson, was expected to meet on Wednesday with prosecutors and investigators, local media reported. His lawyer, Freeman Bosley, a former St. Louis mayor, did not immediately answer requests for comment.

PRESIDENT OBAMA CALLS FOR REFLECTIONPlay Video

Police have declined to release the name of the officer involved in the incident, citing concerns for his safety, a decision that has been criticized by demonstrators who have asked for more transparency. The officer has been placed on administrative leave.

Jackson said his priority was improving race relations in Ferguson, which has seen a stark demographic shift in recent decades, going from mostly white to mostly black. About two-thirds of the town's 21,000-strong population are black. On a police force of 53, three officers are black.

"This is an opportunity to fix what's wrong," he said. He said that the U.S. Department of Justice was advising Ferguson officials on how to improve relations with the community and would work with civil rights groups.

Jackson said investigation would last two weeks.

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT

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People march in locked arms through the streets of downtown Clayton. Mo. on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2014, …

Ferguson residents were still trying to make sense out of what happened on Wednesday.

"I cannot condone violence, but I definitely understand where the anger of young black men comes from at times like this. I don't think until you've experienced that kind of treatment that you can understand it," said Mike McCoy, 41, who runs an African-American youth program.

McCoy, who said he has been a victim of racial profiling by local police, was visiting a memorial of candles, teddy bears and messages near where Brown was killed.

National figures from President Barack Obama to civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton have called for a peaceful response to the shooting.

About 40 protesters have been arrested since Saturday.

Michael Brown's Death Compares To Other Racial …Play Video

After Tuesday night's protests were broken up by tear gas, a St. Louis County Police officer shot and critically wounded a 19-year-old male who allegedly pointed a gun at the officer. The man who was shot had been involved with the earlier protests, police said.

Meanwhile, police in California were investigating a separate incident of an officer fatally shooting an unarmed 25-year-old black man in Los Angeles.

On social media, groups claiming to be associated with the Anonymous hacker activist group called for nationwide protests and threatened to reveal personal information about Ferguson police officers.

The Ferguson police said there have been attempts to hack their website and that it was temporarily disrupted.

Ferguson Police spokesman Tim Zoll said the cyber-threats prompted the decision not to release the officer's name.

Anonymous groups, using Twitter names @TheAnonMessage and @OpFerguson, posted a two-hour audio file they said was of dispatch center conversations after Brown was shot. St. Louis County Police Department spokesman Brian Schellman said the police response to the incident is part of the investigation.

On the recording a dispatcher is heard telling another dispatcher that she is learning of the officer-involved shooting through reporters who were calling. The dispatchers were not heard requesting rescue personnel to respond but did send K-9 units and more police to the scene to control the crowd.

(Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Andrew Hay and Eric Walsh)

US credits strikes with allowing Iraqis to escape

EDGARTOWN, Mass. (AP) — Crediting U.S. airstrikes and humanitarian aid, the Obama administration said Wednesday many trapped Iraqis have fled a mountain where they had sought refuge from militants, making it less likely the military would have to carry out a potentially dangerous rescue mission.

The assessment came after U.S. troops secretly scouted Sinjar Mountain Wednesday, revealing far fewer people than originally thought.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said six days of U.S. airstrikes against militant targets in the region gave many people an opportunity to get off the mountain. He also said the food and water supplies the U.S. airdropped to the refugees helped to sustain them during the ordeal.

U.S. officials said only several thousand refugees remained on the mountain, far lower than the tens of thousands that had been reported earlier. As a result, a rescue mission is "far less likely now," Hagel said Wednesday night, adding that those Iraqis who remained on the mountain were in relatively good condition.

President Barack Obama had been weighing a range of military options, including airlifts and humanitarian corridors, to rescue the refugees. Officials said Obama had not completely ruled out the possibility of a mission to rescue those remaining on the mountain, but agreed with Hagel's assessment that such steps were now less likely.

Obama had dispatched 129 troops to Iraq on Tuesday to assess the scope of the humanitarian crisis and options for getting the people safely off the mountain.

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Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, Ben Rhodes, speaks …

That process was advanced Wednesday when a team of fewer than 20 U.S. troops was flown onto the mountain by Black Hawk helicopter for a firsthand look at rescue mission possibilities. They were safely extracted hours later.

A U.S. military -led rescue mission could have involved putting American troops on the ground. The White House insisted any such action would be strictly a humanitarian rescue and would not constitute a return to combat 2 1/2 years after the last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq.

While the U.S. has been dropping food and water to the refugees for several days, officials said they began considering a rescue mission because it was unsustainable to let thousands of people remain on the mountain.

"There needs to be a lasting solution that gets that population to a safe space where they can receive more permanent assistance," White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters traveling with the president during his vacation on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard.

Thousands of Iraqi religious minorities sought refuge on Sinjar Mountain after militants from the Islamic State group swept through their village in northern Iraq. In addition to the humanitarian aid drops, the U.S. has conducted airstrikes against Islamic State targets, both to protect American personnel in the region and stop the militants from moving on the civilians again.

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Displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community gather for food at the Nowruz camp, in Derike, Syria, Tue …

On Wednesday, a U.S. drone aircraft attacked and destroyed an armed truck operated by Islamic militants near Sinjar, the U.S. Central Command said.

Obama has ruled out sending combat troops back into Iraq, where nearly 4,500 Americans were killed during the eight year war that ended in 2011.

The Pentagon said the U.S. would continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the displaced Iraqis as needed, as well as take steps to protect U.S. personnel and facilities in the region.

Some of the U.S. airstrikes have been aimed at keeping militants from advancing on Irbil, the capital of the largely autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region and home to a U.S. consulate.

The Pentagon said the assessment team was transported to Irbil by a small number of V-22 Osprey aircraft from an undisclosed location in the Middle East.

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Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, Ben Rhodes, speaks …

The assessment team joins 90 U.S. military advisers already in Baghdad and 160 in a pair of operations centers — one in Irbil and one in Baghdad, the central government's capital — working with Iraqi security forces.

They were in addition to about 455 U.S. security forces and 100 military personnel working in the Office of Security Cooperation in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

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Burns reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, contributed to this report.

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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Robert Burns at http://www.twitter.com/robertburnsAP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Far fewer refugees remain on Iraq's Sinjar Mountain and a U.S.-led rescue mission is far less likely, U.S. officials said.

A team of U.S. military personnel assessed the situation and reported that only several thousand refuges are on the mountain and that they appear to be in relatively good condition, the Pentagon said in a statement Wednesday night. Tens of thousands had been reported on the mountain last week.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel credited airdrops of food and water for sustaining those on the mountain and airstrikes for pushing back Islamic State militants and allowing refugees to leave.

"As a result of that assessment, I think it's most likely far less likely now that we would undertake any kind of specific humanitarian rescue mission that we have been planning," Hagel told reporters as he returned to Washington from a world tour. "That doesn't mean that we won't."

Iraq remains a troubled country, Hagel said, but he called the assessment of Sinjar Mountain a bit of good news. Of the U.S. effort in Iraq, he said: "It's not over. It's not complete."

Attacks across Iraq's north and west by the Islamic State group and its Sunni militant allies this summer have displaced members of the minority Christian and Yazidi religious communities and threatened neighboring Iraqi Kurds in the autonomous region.

Thousands of Yazidis on the mountain were able to leave each night over the last several days, Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said in a statement.

The U.S. troops and U.S. Agency for International Development staff who conducted the assessment on Sinjar — fewer than 20 people overall — did not engage in combat operations and all returned safely to Irbil by military air, Kirby said.

"The Yazidis who remain are in better condition than previously believed and continue to have access to the food and water that we have dropped," Kirby said. "Based on this assessment the interagency has determined that an evacuation mission is far less likely. Additionally, we will continue to provide humanitarian assistance as needed and will protect U.S. personnel and facilities."

The U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday that four U.S. cargo planes airdropped 108 bundles of food and water to the remaining people atop the mountain. It was the seventh U.S. delivery of food and water since the relief operation began last week.

See also

Pentagon: Iraq rescue mission 'far less likely'

The U.S. says far fewer refugees remain trapped on a mountain and they appear to be in relatively good shape.
Airdrops continue

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — Police used tear gas and smoke bombs to repel crowds who threw Molotov cocktails during another violent night on the streets of a St. Louis suburb in the wake of the shooting of the unarmed 18-year old Michael Brown.

Hours earlier, the police chief had said race relations were the top priority in the town, where a white police officer fatally shot the black teen. Authorities have vowed to reach across the racial, economic and generational divide in a community in search of answers.

In the streets of Ferguson, though, the polite dialogue heard at community forums and news conferences is nowhere to be found.

Instead, officers from multiple departments in riot gear and in military equipment have clashed nightly with protesters, who chant, "Hands up, don't shoot." Wednesday saw more tense confrontations and further volleys of tear gas from police — this time paired with smoke bombs in response to flaming projectiles and other objects lobbed from the crowd. Protesters faced heavily armed police who at times trained weapons on them from armored trucks.

Two reporters said they were detained by police for not clearing out quickly enough from a McDonald's where they were working, near the protests but away from the more volatile areas. The two, who work for The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, were released without any charges. Both say they were assaulted but not seriously hurt.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that about 10 people had been arrested, including St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who has been chronicling the protests on social media. Police had said earlier they would not have arrest information until early Thursday.

Residents in Ferguson have complained about what they called a heavy-handed police presence that began with the use of dogs for crowd control soon after Brown's shooting — a tactic that for some invoked the specter of civil rights protests a half-century ago. The county police force took over leading both the investigation of Brown's shooting and the subsequent attempts to keep the peace at the smaller city's request.

County Police Chief Jon Belmar, though, said his officers have responded with "an incredible amount of restraint," as they've been the targets of rocks, bottles and gunshots, with two dozen patrol vehicles being destroyed.

"It's pretty amazing how impressed I am and inspired by these officers," he said. "This is a very difficult circumstance."

Police had also asked earlier that people assemble in "an organized and respectful" manner and disperse before evening.

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A protester takes shelter from smoke billowing around him Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014, in Freguson, Mo. …

The city and county are also under criticism for refusing to release the name of the officer involved in Brown's shooting, citing threats against that officer and others.

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson called improving race relations "the top priority right now" but also said he won't be pressured into publicly identifying the officer — despite, he said, mounting demands from clergy, computer hackers and protesters.

"We have the right to know, and the family has the right to know who murdered their son," said Sahari Gutierrez, a 27-year-old Ferguson legal assistant.

Jackson said he also welcomes Justice Department training on racial relations in the suburb, where two-thirds of the 21,000 residents are black while all but three of the police force's 53 officers are white.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon cited the "worsening situation" in Ferguson in saying he would be in the area Thursday. He asked community members to be patient and calm while the investigation proceeds and urged law enforcement agencies to "keep the peace and respect the rights of residents and the press."

Jackson said the investigation remains weeks away from completion.

Police have said Brown was shot after an officer encountered him and another man on the street. They say one of the men pushed the officer into his squad car, then physically assaulted him in the vehicle and struggled with the officer over the officer's weapon. At least one shot was fired inside the car.

The struggle then spilled onto the street, where Brown was shot multiple times. In their initial news conference about the shooting, police didn't specify whether Brown was the person who scuffled with the officer in the car and have refused to clarify their account.

Jackson said Wednesday that the officer involved sustained swelling facial injuries.

Dorian Johnson, who says he was with Brown when the shooting happened, has told a much different story. He has told media outlets that the officer ordered them out of the street, then tried to open his door so close to the men that it "ricocheted" back, apparently upsetting the officer.

Johnson says the officer grabbed his friend's neck, then tried to pull him into the car before brandishing his weapon and firing. He says Brown started to run and the officer pursued him, firing multiple times. Johnson and another witness both say Brown was on the street with his hands raised when the officer fired at him repeatedly.

Among the protesters critical of the police response has been state Sen. Maria Chapelle-Nadal, a Democrat from nearby University City

"I just want to know if I'm going to be gassed again, like I was on Monday night?" she asked Jackson at a press conference. "And I was peaceful. And I'm your state senator."

"I hope not," he replied.

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Associated Press reporters Jim Salter and Jim Suhr contributed to this story. Suhr reported from St. Louis.

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Follow Alan Scher Zagier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/azagier