  In this paper we present a new family of identities for multiple harmonic
sums which generalize a recent result of Hessami Pilehrood et al. We then apply
it to obtain a family of identities relating multiple zeta star values to
alternating Euler sums. In such a typical identity the entries of the multiple
zeta star values consist of blocks of arbitrarily long 2-strings separated by
positive integers greater than two while the largest depth of the alternating
Euler sums depends only on the number of 2-string blocks but not on their
lengths.
