Israel pulls troops as new Gaza truce begins
Print Edition
ISRAEL withdrew ground forces from the Gaza Strip yesterday and started a 72-hour cease-fire with Hamas mediated by Egypt as a first step toward negotiations on a more enduring end to the month-old war.
Minutes before the truce began at 0500 GMT, Hamas launched a salvo of rockets, calling them revenge for Israel’s massacres. Israel’s anti-missile system shot down one rocket over Jerusalem, police said. Another hit a house in a town near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. There were no casualties.
Israeli armor and infantry left Gaza ahead of the truce, with a military spokesman saying their main goal of destroying cross-border infiltration tunnels dug by Islamist militants had been completed.
Troops and tanks will be “redeployed in defensive positions outside the Gaza Strip and we will maintain those defensive positions,” Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said, reflecting Israeli readiness to resume fighting if attacked.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Islamist Hamas faction that rules Gaza, said Israel’s offensive in the densely populated, coastal enclave was a “100 percent failure.”
Israel sent officials to join talks in Cairo to cement a longer-term deal during the course of the truce. Hamas and Islamic Jihad also dispatched representatives from Gaza.
In Gaza, where some half-million people have been displaced by a month of bloodshed, some residents, carrying mattresses and with children in tow, left UN shelters to trek back to neighborhoods where whole blocks have been destroyed by Israeli shelling and the smell of decomposing bodies fills the air.
In the northern town of Beit Lahiya, Zuhair Hjaila, a 33-year-old father of four, said he lost his house and his supermarket.
“This is complete destruction,” he said. “I never thought I would come back to find an earthquake zone.”
Visiting International Red Cross President Peter Maurer, responding to local criticism that his organization was late in helping some of the victims, said “we were insufficiently able to bridge the gap between our willingness to protect them and our ability to do so.”
Several previous truce attempts by Egypt and other regional powers failed to calm the worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in two years.
An Israeli official said that in the hour before the cease-fire came into effect, the civilian airspace over Tel Aviv was closed as a precaution against Gaza rockets, and takeoffs and landings were delayed at Ben-Gurion Airport.
Gaza officials say the war has killed 1,867 Palestinians, most of them civilians.
Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed since fighting began on July 8.
Hamas said it had informed Egypt “of its acceptance of a 72-hour period of calm,” beginning on Tuesday.
The Palestinian cabinet issued a statement after its weekly meeting in Ramallah welcoming the cease-fire.
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