This Article is From Jul 15, 2014

Israel and Hamas Consider Egyptian Proposal for a Cease-Fire in Air Attacks

Israel and Hamas Consider Egyptian Proposal for a Cease-Fire in Air Attacks

A Palestinian mourner chants slogans on the grave of a member of the al-Batsh family who were killed in an Israeli airstrike, during a funeral procession in Gaza City on Sunday on July 13.

Jerusalem: Israel and its main militant Gaza adversary weighed an Egyptian cease-fire proposal late Monday, signaling a possible de-escalation of a week-old aerial battle that has left nearly 200 Palestinians dead from Israeli bombs and has sent hundreds of Gaza rockets deep into Israeli territory.

A senior government official in Israel, which has been preparing for the possibility of a ground invasion of Gaza, said it was seriously considering the Egyptian proposal. The initial reaction of Hamas, the dominant militant group in Gaza, was less committal, but was not an outright rejection.

The proposal envisioned a cease-fire beginning at 9 a.m. local time on Tuesday. It called for border crossings to Gaza to "be opened," with the movement of people and goods to be "facilitated once the security situation becomes stable on the ground." Within 48 hours of the initial cease-fire taking hold, talks are to be held in Cairo with the Israelis and the Palestinian militant factions on conditions for a longer-term truce, according to the text of the proposal.

An Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ambassador Badr Abdelatty, said: "We hope it will be acknowledged. We are in close contact with everyone."

Adding weight to the efforts, Secretary of State John Kerry was expected in Cairo as early as Tuesday, according to officials in the region and the Egyptian state news agency.

The senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate diplomacy, said a meeting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security Cabinet had been called for early Tuesday morning to discuss the proposal and that it was "being considered very seriously."

Hamas, which had said it was prepared to fire rockets indefinitely, appeared to want better terms. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas official in Gaza, wrote on his Facebook page, "The responses of resistance will continue until the demands of our people are achieved. Any unilateral Israeli cessation has no value in the light of the large crimes and the disastrous humanitarian situation." Osama Hamdan, a spokesman for the Islamic group, was more dismissive. He told CNN's "The Situation Room" that Hamas did not receive the proposal directly from the Egyptians. That, he said, meant it was "an initiative for the media. It's not a political initiative."

One of Hamas' demands has been the opening of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, but the Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman said the proposal refers only to crossings "between Israel and Gaza."

Egypt is widely considered the natural regional mediator in such conflicts. But Egypt's relations with Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, have turned bitter since the military ouster last year of Egypt's elected Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, a leader in the Brotherhood. Under the new president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a former general who led the military takeover, Egypt has shut down most of the tunnels beneath its border with Gaza that were both an economic lifeline for the Palestinian coastal enclave as well as a major channel for weapons smuggling.

Tony Blair, the special envoy of the quartet of Middle East peacemakers, which included the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia, welcomed the Egyptian proposal in a statement.

He said: "The hope is that this cease-fire will allow us to put in place such a long-term strategy for the future in Gaza, and the West Bank. The international community will give its full backing to such an initiative."

International entreaties for a cease-fire intensified in recent days amid growing alarm over the rising death toll in Gaza, but there was no letup in the hostilities on Monday. At least 14 Palestinians were killed on the seventh day of Israel's air offensive aimed at quelling the rocket fire, bringing the total death toll in Gaza to about 180, many of them civilians. An airstrike on a house in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip killed a girl, 4, her father and her uncle, according to Gaza health officials.

Pierre Krahenbuhl, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which assists Palestinian refugees, said in a news briefing that he was "deeply alarmed and affected by the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip and the devastating human and physical toll it is taking on civilians, including Palestine refugees."
According to a statement issued by his office, Krahenbuhl called on the Israeli army to "put an end to attacks against, or endangering, civilians and civilian infrastructure, which are contrary to international humanitarian law." He also called for an end to rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israel, which the United Nations has described as indiscriminate.

In a telephone interview, the commander of Israel's 107th Squadron, which is engaged in Gaza using F-16 fighters, said the air force was working methodically according to "a clear policy of minimum harm to civilians," but that everybody knew Gaza, a densely populated sliver of land, was not a "sterile area." Under military rules governing the interview, the squadron commander could not be identified by name.
Hamas has fired about 1,000 rockets at Israel over the last week, hitting new targets as far north as Hadera, about 60 miles from Gaza, and keeping millions of Israelis on alert and running for shelter at the wail of the sirens. On Monday one rocket struck a Bedouin village in the Negev desert and injured two sisters ages 15 and 10, one of them severely, according to the Israeli police.

Egypt helped broker the last cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that ended eight days of fierce, cross-border fighting in November 2012 but the quiet only lasted about 19 months.

Israel has said that this time it wanted to achieve quiet for a long period of time, whether through military means or diplomacy, and ministers had called for Hamas to be stripped of its weapons. With Israeli forces massed along the Gaza border prepared for a ground invasion, some right-wing politicians criticized the cease-fire contacts, complaining that Israel had not finished the job.

Israeli officials have said that Hamas was looking for some kind of an achievement, a "victory image," before giving up the fight. That may have come on Monday when it flew an unmanned aircraft from Gaza into Israel, apparently for the first time.

The Israeli military intercepted the drone, blowing it apart in midair just offshore from the Israeli port city of Ashdod with a Patriot surface-to-air missile, the military said.

The military wing of Hamas claimed on its website that it had sent "a number of drones" flying into Israel on "special missions," saying that the aircraft were one of the "surprises" it had promised over the last week. It was not immediately clear whether the drone, intercepted about 14 miles north of the Gaza Strip, was carrying explosives or surveillance equipment.

"It was shot to smithereens," said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an army spokesman.
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
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