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As Cease-Fire Holds in Gaza, Palestinians Press for Unity As Cease-Fire Holds in Gaza, Palestinians Press for Unity
(about 4 hours later)
GAZA — A cease-fire that halted eight days of lethal conflict between Israel and Hamas brought jubilation to Gaza on Thursday as thousands of flag-waving residents poured into the streets and competing Palestinian factions sought to use the moment to revive their efforts to unify. In Israel, where the mood was more cynical and subdued, troops deployed to the border began pulling back. GAZA — Palestinians erupted in triumphant celebrations here on Thursday, vowing new unity among rival factions and a renewed commitment to the tactic of resistance, while Israel’s leaders sought to soberly sell the achievements of their latest military operation to a domestic audience long skeptical of cease-fire deals like the one announced the night before.
The cease-fire agreement, which took effect on Wednesday night and seemed to be holding through Thursday, averted a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. It did not resolve the underlying issues between the antagonists but said they would be addressed later, in a vague process that would not begin until at least 24 hours of calm had elapsed. After eight days of intense Israeli shelling from air and sea that killed 162 Gazans, including at least 30 militant commanders, and flattened many government buildings and private homes, people poured onto the bomb-blasted streets, beaming as they shopped and strolled under the shield of the cease-fire agreement reached Wednesday in Cairo. The place was awash in flags, not only the signature green of the ruling Hamas party but also the yellow, black and red of rivals Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a rainbow not visible here in years.
The wording of the agreement, reached under strong Egyptian and American diplomatic pressure, allowed both sides to claim some measure of victory in the battle of aerial weaponry that had killed at least 150 Palestinians and five Israelis over the past week. A sixth Israeli, a soldier, died on Thursday from wounds received before the cease-fire. Despite the death and destruction, Hamas emerged emboldened, analysts said, not only because it had landed rockets near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but also from the unprecedented visits and support by Arab and Muslim leaders, potentially resetting the balance of power and tone in Palestinian politics, as leaders from various factions declared the peace process dead.
Whether the agreement succeeds could provide an early test of how Egypt’s new Islamist government might influence the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the most intractable in the Middle East. “The blood of Jabari united the people of the nation on the choice of jihad and resistance,” Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister, declared in a televised speech, referring to the commander Ahmed al-Jabari, killed in an Israeli airstrike at the beginning of the operation last week. “Resistance is the shortest way to liberate Palestine.”
Gaza City roared back to life after more than a week of nonstop Israeli aerial assaults had left the streets vacant. Gazans carried flags not just in the signature green of Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, but also the yellow of its rival Fatah faction, the black of Islamic Jihad and the red of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There were neither celebrations nor significant protests across the border in Israel, where people in southern cities passed the first day in more than a week without constant sirens signaling incoming rockets sending them to safe rooms. Instead, an uneasy, even grim calm set in. The military announced that an officer, Lt. Boris Yarmulnik, 28, had died from wounds sustained in a rocket attack the day before, bringing the death toll on the Israeli side to six, four of them civilians. The Israeli authorities announced several arrests, including an Arab Israeli citizen, for a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that revived memories of the violence from the last Palestinian uprising.
“It’s the first time in 70 years I feel proud and my head held high,” said Mohamed Rajah, 71, a refugee from Haifa, Israel, who rushed to kiss four masked militants of the Islamic Jihad faction as they prepared for a news conference. “It’s a great victory for the people of Palestine. Nobody says it’s Hamas, nobody says it’s Islamic Jihad or Fatah — Palestine only.” But there was collective relief in Israel as thousands of army reservists, sent to the Gaza border ahead of a possible ground invasion, gradually began returning home. With national elections eight weeks away, Israeli politicians tried to showcase accomplishments without raising expectations.
Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister of Gaza who had largely remained in hiding after the initial Israeli assault on Nov. 14 that killed Ahmed al-Jabari, the head of the Hamas military wing, appeared at a unity rally alongside Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative, a member of the Palestinian leadership that governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank and who has spent the past several days in Gaza. Mr. Barghouti said the leaders of all Palestinian factions would meet in Cairo in coming days to discuss reconciling their differences. “It could last nine months or it could last nine weeks,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said of the cease-fire. “When it does not last, we will know what to do. We see clearheadedly the possibility that we will have to do this again.”
“The Palestinian people have won today,” Mr. Barghouti told hundreds outside the parliament building. “We must continue this victory by making our national unity.” Mr. Haniya, in a televised speech later, said “The blood of Jabari united the people of the nation on the choice of jihad and resistance.” And so it went on the day after the latest round in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What was widely heralded as a game changer by Palestinian politicians and independent analysts alike was viewed by Israeli officials and commentators as a maintenance mission that had succeeded in its stated goals: restoring quiet after months of intensifying rocket fire, and culling the weapons cache of Gaza’s armed groups.
With Israeli forces still massed on the Gaza border, a tentative calm in the fighting descended after the agreement was announced. But the tens of thousands of Israeli reservists called up during the crisis began to withdraw from staging areas along the Gaza border, where the Israeli military had prepared for a possible invasion of Gaza for the second time in four years. Details of the cease-fire agreement announced Wednesday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Egyptian foreign minister remained unclear. Both sides pledged to stop the violence, and Palestinians say Israel will loosen its restrictions on fishing off Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline and farming along its northern and eastern borders. But the critical question of whether the border crossings would be open wide for people and commerce was not fully addressed, with only a vague promise that discussions would ensue after 24 hours. The exact agenda, time, location and even participants in these discussions have not been announced.
In southern Israel, the target of more than 1,500 rockets fired from Gaza over the past week, wary residents began to return to routine. But schools within a 25-mile radius of the Palestinian enclave remained closed. At the same time, Mustafa Barghouti, a West Bank leader who has spent the last several days in Gaza, said the Palestinian factions had agreed to meet in Cairo for another round of unity talks in the next few days, as President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority prepares to take his case for observer-state status to the United Nations next week. Though Hamas and Fatah, the party Mr. Abbas leads, have signed four reconciliation agreements in the five years since Hamas took control of Gaza after winning elections here, Mr. Barghouti said this time was different.
A rocket alert sounded at the small village of Nativ Haasara near the border with Gaza on Thursday morning, sending residents running for shelter. The military said the alert had been a false alarm. “Hamas is stronger, of course, and Abbas is having to change his line because negotiations failed,” he said after appearing with Mr. Haniya at a rally in front of the Parliament building. “This time Israel felt the heat of the Arab Spring, and Gaza was not isolated; the whole Arab world was here. The road is open for unity.”
Israel Radio said a dozen rockets were fired from Gaza in the first few hours of the cease-fire, but Israeli forces did not respond. In the rival Twitter feeds that offered a cyberspace counterpoint to the exchanges of airstrikes and rockets, the Israel Defense Forces said they had achieved their objectives of severely damaging Hamas’s military capabilities. First, though, Hamas faces an enormous rebuilding effort, with at least 10 of its government buildings — including the ministries of culture, education and interior; the prime minister’s headquarters; police stations — now reduced to rubble littered with payroll sheets and property tax rolls. A spokesman said that the government kept most records on laptops, but the Abu Khadra, a huge complex of constituent services, is gone.
At the same time, Israeli security forces said on Thursday that they had detained 55 Palestinian militants in the West Bank after confrontations. The army said the detentions were designed to “continue to maintain order” and to “prevent the infiltration of terrorists into Israeli communities.” Dr. Hassan Khalaf, director of Al Shifa Hospital, which was not attacked, dismissed the worry. “We can gather under the sky under a tent,” he said. “They can come to my house.”
Many residents in the south expressed doubt that the agreement would hold, partly because at least five Palestinian rockets thudded into southern Israel shortly after the cease-fire had commenced. In Jerusalem, Dan Meridor, a senior minister of intelligence and atomic energy, told reporters that Israel had “used force in a very moderate and measured way.” He said the military had struck 10 times the number of targets compared with the previous government’s invasion of Gaza four years ago but killed far fewer people than during that invasion: slightly over 10 percent. One of the main military achievements, he said, was the destruction of most of the long-range Iranian Fajr-5 missiles in Gaza.
The one-page memorandum of understanding left the issues that have most inflamed the tensions between the Israelis and the Gazans up for further negotiation. Israel demands long-term border security, including an end to Palestinian missile launching over the border. Hamas wants an end to an Israeli embargo that has severely impeded the movement of goods and people in Gaza. Responding to criticism from the far right and many residents of the south that Israel did not go far enough by failing to cripple Hamas, Mr. Meridor said: “Could we win Gaza from Hamas? Obviously, if we decide to do it. Then we have to ask ourselves what we will do once we are there.”
The deal demonstrated the pragmatism of Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, who balanced public support for Hamas with a determination to preserve the peace with Israel. But it was unclear whether the agreement would be a turning point or merely a lull in the conflict. Analysts said that by stopping short of a ground invasion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged from the crisis looking like a moderate, responsible leader, not a trigger-happy adventurer. Currently facing no credible rival for the premiership, he also can campaign on an improved relationship with President Obama, who, according to Israeli officials, displayed no vindictiveness as he helped mediate the dispute, despite the widely held perception that Mr. Netanyahu had supported Mitt Romney. He can claim credit for the start of a mechanism for better communication with Egypt’s new leadership.
The cease-fire deal was reached only through a final American diplomatic push: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred for hours with Mr. Morsi and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at the presidential palace here. Hanging over the talks was the Israeli shock at a Tel Aviv bus bombing on Wednesday — praised by Hamas — that recalled past Palestinian uprisings and raised fears of heavy Israeli retaliation. After false hopes the day before, Western and Egyptian diplomats said they had all but given up hope for a quick end to the violence. “Everybody wanted a situation where they could not have a ground operation and they could have Hamas sing ‘Hatikva,’ ” said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communications at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, referring to the Israeli national anthem. “Frankly, I have to say kudos to Netanyahu, and I don’t usually pay him compliments. I think he got the best out of a bad situation.”
Tellingly, neither Israel nor Hamas was represented in the final talks or the announcement, leaving it in the hands of a singular partnership between their proxies, the United States and Egypt. Of course there were mixed feelings. On Mr. Netanyahu’s Facebook page, Gila Glickerman, the mother of a combat soldier, thanked the prime minister for bringing her son home, while Shai Solomon wrote, “You’ve just lost a vote at the ballot box.”
There were immediate questions about the durability of the deal. Hamas, which controls Gaza, has in the past not fulfilled less formal cease-fires by failing to halt all missile fire into Israel by breakaway Palestinian militants. Orly Peretz, a mother of five who lives in Ashkelon — one of the southern cities hardest hit by the more than 1,500 rockets fired from Gaza in the latest conflict — said she felt relaxed Thursday for the first time in a long time, and was unconcerned about what Israel might have relinquished in the cease-fire. “It doesn’t matter how it comes about; people want their quiet,” she said. But Linda Kabuli, who owns a salon in the even harder-hit town of Sderot, said she would have preferred a ground invasion “to eliminate every terrorist.”
Neither side retreated from threats to resume the conflict if the deal fell through, and both said they had only reluctantly agreed under international pressure. In a televised news conference, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel declared that some Israelis still expected “a much harsher military operation, and it is very possible we will be compelled to embark on one.” “This is Hamas’s victory, the terrorists,” Ms. Kabuli said. “And the proof is that they got up and danced and sang. Today is a holiday for them; it’s not a day of mourning.”
But he said that in a telephone conversation with Mr. Obama earlier in the evening, “I agreed with him that it is worth giving the cease-fire a chance.” He added that he had reached an undisclosed agreement with Mr. Obama to “work together against the smuggling of weapons” to Palestinian militants, for which Mr. Netanyahu blamed Iran. There were, actually, still funerals going on in Gaza City, but Hamas declared Nov. 22 a national holiday not just this year but going forward. Women, not seen much in public in the past week, ventured to the hairdresser. Men waited at an A.T.M. to withdraw money. Teenage boys spooned ice cream from waffle cones on a street corner. Shopkeepers swept debris, and people snapped pictures of the devastation on smartphones.

Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram from Gaza, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

Everything was different, not just from the previous day, but from earlier this month, when Hamas had prevented Fatah from holding a rally commemorating the anniversary of Yasir Arafat’s death, and from March, when Islamic Jihad accused Hamas of giving up on resistance after it had struggled to contain Israel-bound rocket fire from more militant groups.
Thursday morning, minutes after five masked men from Islamic Jihad declared victory before a bank of news cameras, hundreds of Fatah members paraded past the same point with pictures of Arafat, as Hamas security officials kept order.
“It’s the first time in 70 years I feel proud and my head is high,” said Mohamed Rajah, 71, a refugee from Haifa who had kissed the militants when they arrived. “It’s a great victory for the people of Palestine. Nobody says it’s Hamas, nobody says it’s Islamic Jihad or Fatah — Palestine only.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza and Tamir Elterman from Sderot, Israel.