Open-ended cease-fire caps 7 weeks of Gaza fighting

Palestinians celebrate Tuesday in Gaza City after the latest ceasefire was announced.
Palestinians celebrate Tuesday in Gaza City after the latest ceasefire was announced.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Israel and Hamas agreed Tuesday to an open-ended cease-fire, halting a seven-week war that killed more than 2,200 people, the vast majority Palestinians, left tens of thousands in Gaza homeless and devastated entire neighborhoods in the blockaded territory.

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Shouts of "God is great" rang out from mosque loudspeakers across Gaza City, as people fired guns into the air to celebrate. Hamas declared victory, but the terms of the deal fell far short of the group's demand that Israel and Egypt open Gaza's borders.

Under the Egyptian-brokered deal, Israel is to ease imports into Gaza, including aid and material for reconstruction. It also allows Palestinians to fish 6 nautical miles offshore, up from 3 nautical miles.

In a month, the cease-fire calls for talks to begin in Cairo on more complex issues, including building a seaport and airport in Gaza, and Israel's demand that Hamas disarm.

However, the agreement appeared to contain no major Israeli concessions and previous understandings after a round of fighting in 2012 quickly dissipated.

Previous cease-fire deals have collapsed since the fighting began July 8. The new truce took effect at 7 p.m. Gaza time, but violence persisted until the last minute.

In Israel, mortar shells fired from Gaza killed one man and seriously wounded two people, authorities said.

photo

AP

An Israeli man looks at the damage to a house Tuesday in the coastal city of Ashkelon that was hit by a rocket fired from northern Gaza.

In Gaza, police reported that an Israeli airstrike 13 minutes before the cease-fire began collapsed a five-story building in the town of Beit Lahiya. Booms from Israeli strikes could be heard in Gaza after the truce announcement was made.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a longtime rival of Hamas, likely will play a key role in any new border deal for Gaza. Abbas lost control of Gaza after Hamas seized the territory in 2007. He is expected to regain a foothold there under the Egyptian-brokered agreement.

In such a scenario, forces loyal to Abbas could be posted at Gaza's border crossings to allay fears by Israel and Egypt about renewed attempts by Hamas to smuggle weapons into the territory.

Israel also is concerned that material for reconstruction could be diverted by Hamas for military purposes. In recent years, Hamas has built a network of attack tunnels under the border with Gaza that Israel says its forces largely demolished during the Gaza fighting.

"We're not interested in allowing Hamas to rebuild its military machine," a senior Israeli official said on the condition of anonymity.

In a televised address Tuesday night, Abbas said the end of the fighting underscored the need to find a permanent solution to the conflict with Israel.

"What's next? Gaza has been subjected to three wars. Shall we expect another war in a year or two? Until when will this issue be without a solution?" he asked.

Aides have said Abbas plans to ask the United Nations Security Council to demand Israel's withdrawal from all lands captured in the 1967 Mideast war to make way for an independent Palestinian state.

Abbas alluded to the plan in his speech.

"Today, I'm going to give the Palestinian leadership my vision for a solution and after that we will continue consultations with the international community," he said. "This vision must be clear and well defined and we are not going to an open-ended negotiation."

In Gaza, Hamas declared victory even though it had little to show for seven weeks of fighting. The fighting killed more than 2,140 Palestinians and wounded more than 11,000, Palestinian health officials said. The U.N. said about three-fourths of the Palestinians killed have been civilians.

"We are here today to declare the victory of the resistance, the victory of Gaza, with the help of God, and the steadfastness of our people and the noble resistance," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a news conference at Gaza's Shifa Hospital.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki said the U.S. "strongly supported" the cease-fire agreement and asked all sides to comply with their terms after others had broken down.

"We view this as an opportunity, not a certainty," Psaki said. "Today's agreement comes after many hours and days of negotiations and discussions. But certainly there's a long road ahead. And we're aware of that and we're going into this eyes wide open."

Israel and Egypt imposed the border blockade after the Hamas takeover of 2007. Under the restrictions, virtually all of Gaza's 1.8 million people cannot trade or travel. Only a few thousand are able to leave the coastal territory every month.

During the fighting, Hamas had said it would only cease fire if the blockade was lifted.

However, Israeli pressure on the group has been escalating. Hamas is believed to be left with just one-third of its initial rocket arsenal of 10,000.

On the Israeli side, 70 people have been killed, all but six of them soldiers. Thousands of Israelis living near Gaza have fled their homes, including in recent days when Gaza militants stepped up mortar fire on southern Israel.

The Gaza fighting stems from the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank by Hamas operatives in June, which triggered an Israeli arrest campaign in the West Bank, followed by an increase in rocket fire from Gaza.

Since the fighting began, Israel has launched some 5,000 airstrikes at Gaza, while Gaza militants have fired close to 4,000 rockets and mortars, according to the Israeli military.

The violence continued Tuesday before the cease-fire was announced.

In Ashkelon, an Israeli city less than 10 miles from Gaza, a long-range rocket destroyed one home, damaged dozens of others and sent 20 people to the hospital, the most in a single strike this summer.

The rocket smashed through the red-tile roof of the home where Yuval and Ofra Cohen had lived for 10 years with their children, now 14 and 17, according to the Israeli police and Ynet, an Israeli news site.

"We hadn't managed to make it into the safe room when it fell in our bedroom," Cohen said in an interview on Army Radio. "It caught us in the children's room, all the shrapnel and the dust and all of the glass. I don't know how we escaped without harm, it's a miracle."

In Gaza, the Health Ministry said two people were killed in an afternoon airstrike in east Gaza City. Two others died in a drone attack in the territory's north, and two more were killed in an airstrike at dawn, the ministry said. Voice of Palestine radio said that more than 20 homes had been destroyed overnight.

Israel also destroyed two Gaza City towers in the early hours Tuesday, after having destroyed an 11-story Gaza City apartment tower Saturday.

The high-rise destroyed Tuesday, known as the Italian Compound, had 13 floors, with four apartments on each floor. It rose above an 80,000-square-foot mall with seven cafes surrounding a garden and shops selling shoes, pharmaceuticals and mobile-phone accessories, as well as the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Public Works.

It was one of Gaza's finest residential buildings, with 24-hour guards, and generators and wells to keep the elevator running and taps flowing when electricity and water ran short.

On Tuesday morning, the apartment line on the southeast corner and the elevator shaft were all that was left after a series of Israeli airstrikes that started after midnight, injuring about a dozen residents and leaving 40 families homeless.

"We spent the whole night in the street outside because it was dangerous to move," said Hani Ashi, 44, who bought his 1,750-square-foot apartment on the tower's fifth floor for $63,000 four years ago.

Zaki Shneino, a guard who has worked at the building for 10 years, said that shortly after midnight Tuesday, several residents received calls on their mobile phones advising them to evacuate.

Ashi, who lived on the fifth floor with his wife and eight children, the youngest of them 10-year-old twins, said there were four drone-fired missiles, warning shots that Israel calls "knocks on the roof," 10 to 20 minutes apart, then six or seven bombs dropped by warplanes.

The other building hit Tuesday morning was Al Basha, a 12-story office tower over four stores, including one that sold bathroom tiles and fixtures and one showcasing Palestinian-made juice. Some people whose homes elsewhere in Gaza had been destroyed during the summer's fighting had been staying in the building's basement.

Information for this article was contributed by Mohammed Daraghmeh, Karin Laub, Sarah El Deeb, Josef Federman and Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press and by Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren of The New York Times.

A Section on 08/27/2014

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