Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Israel to fully lift its blockade of Gaza, calling a partial easing of the lockdown yesterday "insufficient."
"This is insufficient and we will continue our efforts to get a total lifting of the blockade," Abbas told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah after talks with visiting Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen.
Abbas renewed criticism of militant rocket fire against Israel from Gaza.
"We have condemned these futile launchings in the past and we continue to do so. They must stop," Abbas said.
Israel eased a punishing blockade of the Hamas-run territory yesterday by allowing limited amounts of fuel to enter Gaza for the first time since last Thursday.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had voiced her concerns to Israel which said it had sealed border crossings because of Palestinian rocket salvoes.
"Nobody wants innocent Gazans to suffer and so we have spoken to the Israelis about the importance of not allowing a humanitarian crisis to unfold there," Rice told reporters traveling with her to Berlin for a meeting on Iran.
Israel gave the EU permission to bring a week's worth of EU-fund industrial fuel for the generating plant, which was shut down on Sunday after Israel tightened border restrictions.
The plant's director, Derar Abu Sissi, said that one of its two turbines powered back up as the fuel arrived, restoring electricity to some outlying areas of populous Gaza City.
Israel said it would also allow in 500,000 liters of diesel for generators, a supply of cooking gas and 50 trucks of food and medicine, though restrictions on fuel for cars remained.
"Our approach now is to assess what is acutely lacking, and permit imports on that basis," Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror said.
The EU and world agencies denounced the closure as illegal "collective punishment" against Gaza's 1.5 million residents, many of whom depend on foreign aid.
Israel insisted that the Gazan privations were not reaching a crisis point and said its measures were a justified reaction to rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas and other factions.
The closure, and accompanying scenes such as the electricity blackout and bread queues, rallied even Palestinians who had been divided by a June civil war in which Hamas seized Gaza from the secular Fatah faction of Abbas.
Yesterday morning, Palestinian lawmakers in Gaza held a session by candlelight, drawing curtains on windows to keep out sunlight as invited television crews filmed the meeting.
Israel has accused Hamas of exaggerating the impact of the blockade.
The decision to allow in emergency supplies, Israeli officials said, followed a decline in the number of rocket attacks.
Meanwhile, Egyptian border guards fired in the air and used clubs and water cannon to drive back hundreds of Palestinian women who surged across the border from Gaza yesterday in a protest to back their demands for the frontier to be opened for shipments of food and essential provisions, in short supply after Israel's closure of its borders with the coastal strip.
Eywitnesses said that 15 women injured in the scuffle with the Egyptians were taken from the Rafah border crossing by Palestinian ambulances.
They said several thousand women, carrying flags of the militant Islamic Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, demonstrated at the Palestinian side of the crossing.
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