JERUSALEM -- A rocket fired by Palestinian militants killed a 75-year-old Israeli woman Monday, just as an Egyptian mediator was winding up truce talks in Israel -- underlining both the urgency and complexity of working out a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev denounced the latest attack but did not say it would halt the Gaza truce talks. "The rocket fire into Israel will end. It will end either because calm will be achieved, or Israel will act to protect its people," he said.

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Darfur's most-wanted rebel leader vowed Monday to keep up his offensive against the Sudanese government, saying he can exhaust the military by fighting it all across Africa's largest nation.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Khalil Ibrahim said the military success of the Justice and Equality Movement is easy to explain. "We are more spread out and we move fast."

The speed of his forces was widely credited with allowing Ibrahim's men to reach the outskirts of Khartoum to launch an attack Saturday without being detected by government troops. They set out from the Darfur and Kordofan regions under cover of night in vehicles similar to those used by the army, racing across the vast arid terrain of central Sudan.

MOSCOW -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wasted no time in naming his new Cabinet on Monday, bringing in loyalists from the Kremlin in what was seen as an effort to shift the center of power to his new place of work.

He also left several prominent ministers untouched, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.

Putin announced the 24 positions, eight of them new, at a Cabinet meeting in the government headquarters, the ministers already seated according to their new appointments.

President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's hand-picked successor who was inaugurated last week, quickly approved the appointments, which included the demotion of a former rival.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pulled his party from the Cabinet on Monday, raising doubts over the new government's stability and Pakistan's transition to democracy after eight years of military rule.

The ruling coalition that came to power after February elections -- dealing a crushing defeat to allies of President Pervez Musharraf -- could now flounder. Its two key partners cannot agree over how to restore senior judges removed by the former military strongman late last year.

Sharif said his group would still support the government led by the party of Asif Ali Zardari on an "issue by issue" basis, but also indicated he would join protests by lawyers lobbying for the restoration of the judges -- which risks intensifying the standoff between the parties.

A permanent split in the coalition would boost Musharraf, a longtime ally in the U.S.-led war on terror, who has taken a back seat since the new civilian government took power in late March.

WARSAW, Poland -- Irena Sendler -- credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets -- died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed "great regret" over Sendler's death, calling her "extremely brave" and "an exceptional person." In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler's name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto -- and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.