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Rising Death Toll: More Than 500 Gazans and 27 Israelis
Israel Is Facing Difficult Choice in Gaza Conflict
(about 7 hours later)
JERUSALEM — Four Israeli soldiers and 10 Palestinian militants were killed inside Israeli territory Monday morning, Israeli military officials said, after gunmen from the Gaza Strip managed to infiltrate through two more of the tunnels that Israel says its ground operation is targeting.
JERUSALEM — Israeli leaders have stressed two points in selling their Gaza Strip ground invasion internationally and at home: that they embraced all cease-fire proposals and that troops are targeting tunnels used by Palestinian militants to infiltrate their territory.
As diplomatic pressure for a cease-fire mounted on the conflict’s 14th day, the Palestinian death toll topped 500 and the number of Israeli soldiers killed hit 25, more than twice as many as in Israel’s last Gaza ground operation in 2009. Two Israeli civilians have also died from rocket and mortar fire.
Now, with the lopsided death toll mounting on both sides — more than 550 Gazans, 25 Israeli soldiers and two Israeli civilians — world leaders are demanding an immediate halt to the hostilities. But the operation has uncovered more tunnels than expected, officials said, and there were two more deadly incursions Monday, making many Israelis say they were reluctant to leave a job half-finished.
The military provided few details about the incursions into Israel, outside Gaza’s northeast corner, saying only that “two terror squads were detected.” An airstrike targeted one group of militants, the statement said, and “soldiers who were called to the scene” engaged the other.
That has Israel struggling with a more distilled version of the dilemma it has faced in repeated rounds against Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza. If it stops now, it faces the prospect of a newly embittered enemy retaining the capacity to attack. But if it stays the course, it is liable to kill many more civilians and face international condemnation.
The military released video footage showing several masked gunmen in bushes that it said were about a half-mile from the Israeli border town of Sderot, and an explosion that targeted them as they retreated back into the tunnel. Three other Israeli soldiers were killed in battles inside Gaza on Monday.
“Israel must not agree to any proposal for a cease-fire until the tunnels are eliminated,” Gilad Erdan, the right-wing minister of communications, said during a hospital visit to wounded soldiers.
Ismail Haniya, until recently the Hamas prime minister, said in a speech broadcast from Gaza that the fighting would continue unless an agreement met the movement’s demands: opening crossings; lifting restrictions on fishing, farming, import and export; and releasing prisoners who were freed in a 2011 exchange for an abducted Israeli soldier and recently rearrested.
But Tzipi Livni, the centrist justice minister, told reporters that demilitarizing Gaza could be tackled after an agreement, and that “to cease the fire, stop the fire, this is the main goal right now.”
“We’ll never go back to the period before the aggression, we’ll never go back to the slow death,” Mr. Haniya said in an address laden with Quranic verses. “Gaza will be the graveyard for the invaders, as it always was in the history.”
As Secretary of State John Kerry and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, landed in Cairo on Monday night seeking a cease-fire, analysts set low expectations. The Hamas-Israel feud is in many ways trickier and outside the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis feel they withdrew from Gaza only to allow it to become a launching pad for rockets, and Hamas refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.
In Gaza, the United Nations reported nearly 100,000 people in 67 shelters, as an airlift of 45,000 mattresses and 10,000 blankets was en route from Dubai.
For each, eradicating the other is the goal — not a two-state solution.
As the Palestinian death toll has climbed over two weeks, thousands of people streamed toward Gaza City from the north on foot, in donkey carts and packed into cars. The Israelis seemed to be stepping up artillery shelling in the central Gaza refugee camps of El Bureij and El Mughazi, where they had earlier urged people to evacuate.
This is the third bloody battle between Israel and Hamas in six years, and both previous cease-fire agreements simply restored quiet without touching topics central to the broader conflict, like the borders of a future Palestinian state or the fate of Jerusalem and refugees.
Hamas radio reported that four people were killed in a strike on Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in El Bureij.
“With Hamas there, there is no other option but ‘mowing the grass.’ There is no option for a political solution,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, using an Israeli euphemism for periodic military operations to temporarily roll back Hamas’s arsenal.
Knots of 10 to 12 people were hurrying with plastic bags of belongings across the main road, Salahadin Street, where a shell hit next to a car full of international journalists, spraying shrapnel on the roof. Hazem Abu Ghaben, who lives in El Mughazi, said he had gone to a relative’s house over the weekend, returned home because he thought things had calmed down, then regretted it and was fleeing anew.
“If anybody believes in peace negotiations, two-state solution, Gaza is clear proof that we are far away,” Mr. Inbar added. “The narrower the focus is, the more chances there are for reaching a cease-fire — if you bring in additional issues it makes it much more complicated.”
The situation had gotten “a million times worse,” Mr. Abu Ghaben said.
Israelis have increasingly floated the idea of an international arrangement modeled on the successful effort to remove chemical weapons from Syria. In this case, it would involve having international observers help to identify and eliminate tunnels and the rest of Gaza’s arsenal, but many experts say they find it hard to imagine Hamas would consider such a condition for a cease-fire.
At the Abu Jamei family’s home near the southern town of Khan Younis, people searching beneath the rubble left by an overnight attack on Monday counted 26 bodies, by far the most victims of a single strike in this offensive. In the southern border town of Rafah, artillery shelling of homes belonging to the Siam family killed 11 people, witnesses said, including three children.
Ismail Haniya, until recently the Hamas prime minister, said in a speech Monday that fighting would continue until the movement’s demands were met, including the release of prisoners freed in a 2011 exchange for an abducted Israeli soldier and who were recently rearrested — something most experts find it hard to imagine Israel would consider.
Rocket fire from Gaza slowed somewhat from earlier days, but more than a dozen sirens sounded around midday. One rocket hit a home in Sderot, near Gaza, while the occupants cowered in a safe room, and another landed in an open field near Tel Aviv.
“We’ll never go back to the period before the aggression. We’ll never go back to the slow death,” Mr. Haniya said in a televised address. “Gaza will be the graveyard for the invaders, as it always was in history.”
Across Israel, funerals were scheduled for at least five soldiers from the decorated Golani Brigade who were killed in Shejaiya on Sunday. The military said it had still not determined whether a soldier had indeed been captured alive, as Hamas claimed in a statement on Sunday night. The Israeli military announced that two of the dead were among the hundreds of Americans in the Israeli Army: Max Steinberg, 24, from Southern California and Nissim Sean Carmeli, who grew up in Texas but finished high school in Israel.
Israel seized Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, but withdrew all its settlers and soldiers in 2005 in an evacuation that still roils the society. Right-wingers use the last decade of intermittent fire from Gaza — it continued Monday, with the military’s count of rockets launched since the start of the operation topping 2,000 — as a prime argument against any further withdrawal from occupied territory.
The new underground incursions highlighted a dilemma for Israel’s leadership, which has tried to build international support for its ground operation by saying it was a limited one focused on the tunnel threat, and by embracing cease-fire proposals from Egypt. Now, with President Obama dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to Cairo to seek an immediate halt to hostilities, Israel may be pressured to leave the tunnel mission unfinished in order to restore quiet.
Hamas has ruled there since its bloody rout of the Palestinian Authority in 2007, and Israel bars its citizens from entry, making the tiny coastal enclave crowded with 1.7 million people loom as a frightening enemy in Israeli imagination.
“It’s a very difficult question,” a senior Israeli military official said Sunday night, speaking on the condition of anonymity under military protocol.
A senior Israeli military official said Sunday that the current operation had already wrought more damage on Hamas than Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, and the Palestinian death toll is more than triple that of 2012’s Pillar of Defense.
“We have a mission, and we are going to fulfill it — Israel is not going to leave the threats of tunnels beneath the border between Gaza Strip and Israel,” he said. Still, he added, “after 13 days of fighting, and so many casualties, I believe that it’s the right time for all sides to stop.”
Monday morning, the Abu Jameh family pulled 26 bodies, 19 of them belonging to children, from the rubble of their home near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, the largest toll from a single strike since the battle began July 8. Four people were killed at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the main one serving the center of the crowded coastal enclave. An airstrike Monday night destroyed the top five floors of an apartment building called Al-Salam — the Peace — in central Gaza City, an area that had been seen as a safe haven, killing 11.
Though Israel had a task force studying the tunnels for a year, its forces have discovered since entering Gaza on Thursday that the network is much bigger and more sophisticated than they had anticipated. There are multiple exit and entry points for each tunnel, making them difficult to track and demolish. “Our goal now is to finish the job by really destroying as much tunnels as we can, if not all of them,” the Israeli official said. “It’s very difficult for me to say all of them because there’s always a chance we don’t know all the tunnels, and what you don’t know you simply don’t know.”
Eyewitnesses said Israeli forces also fatally shot Mahmoud Hatem al Shawmreh, 29, in one of several clashes Monday night with Palestinian protesters in the West Bank. Seven Israeli soldiers died in combat Monday, making the total over four days two-and-a-half times the number killed in the three-week Cast Lead. Four were killed inside Israeli territory, along with 10 Gaza gunmen who penetrated the border through tunnels, according to a military statement, at least the fifth such incursion reported by the military since Thursday.
The ground invasion began Thursday night after the Israeli military thwarted a tunnel attack early that morning by what it said were 13 militants. On Saturday morning, some eight men from Gaza disguised in Israeli military uniforms attacked two army jeeps a few hundred yards into Israeli territory, killing a 45-year-old reserve officer and a soldier. There were two other incursions Saturday, one in which the militants were carrying handcuffs and tranquilizers, which the Israeli military said indicated they were planning an abduction.
Micha Ben-Hillel said he heard heavy gunfire outside his home on kibbutz Nir Am outside Gaza’s northeast corner all morning, but was shocked to learn around 8 a.m. that militants had emerged from a tunnel perhaps 500 yards from the community’s homes.
Dan Shapiro, the United States’ ambassador to Israel, said Monday that Mr. Kerry would be working with Egyptians, Israelis and leaders of the Palestinian Authority to “bring back the quiet” that followed a 2012 agreement ending eight days of cross-border violence. In an interview on Israel Radio, Mr. Shapiro said Washington supported “Israel’s right to protect itself” and “understood the need” to destroy tunnels, but was “also worried about the number of dead and injured.”
“When our kids were younger we used to have picnics there,” said Mr. Ben-Hillel, 68, a college English teacher.
“Start with a cease-fire,” he said, “and only after hold discussions on the problems at the base of the crisis.”
Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s defense minister, has said the forces might be able to destroy all the tunnels into Israeli territory within a few days — which may be as long as it takes to push through a cease-fire. Momentum was gathering behind an Egyptian initiative first presented a week ago, but Hamas does not trust the new government in Cairo, which defines it as an enemy.
But Gilad Erdan, a right-wing member of Israel’s so-called security cabinet, which makes strategic decisions, said Israel “must not agree to any proposal for a cease-fire until the tunnels are eliminated,” according to the Israeli news site Ynet. Speaking after he visited wounded soldiers at Barzilai hospital, Mr. Erdan raised the specter of a reoccupation of Gaza, saying that “a green light has been given to expanding the action, and we should consider leaving forces in the northern part of the Gaza Strip to deal with the tunnels at the end of the operation.”
Mr. Ban of the United Nations suggested in Cairo Monday night that a humanitarian pause might be the best path to a more durable cease-fire.
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s justice minister and representative to the American-sponsored peace negotiations with the Palestinians that collapsed in April, said “demilitarization of Gaza” was essential but was “something we will discuss with the international community the day after.”
“The violence must stop, it must stop now,” Mr. Ban said at a news conference with Egypt’s foreign minister. Afterward, “we cannot claim victory by simply returning matters to where they stood before the last terrible bloodshed,” he added.
“Now we are focused on the need to stop these terrorists, to act against these tunnels, and to stop these rockets against Israel,” Ms. Livni said in a conference call with international journalists that was interrupted by sirens signaling incoming rockets from Gaza overhead. “The whole idea of the proposal is to cease the fire, stop the fire. This is the main goal right now.”
Unlike in previous Gaza-Israel negotiations, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority is also trying to forge a role, but statements from his camp have been all over the map. A Palestinian spokesman in Geneva last week called Hamas’s rocket-firing a “crime against humanity” — the same words Mr. Abbas used Sunday to characterize Israel’s killing of some 67 Palestinians in the east Gaza City neighborhood Shejaiya.
Noting that Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, was headed to Cairo as well as Mr. Kerry, she added, “These days are, I believe, crucial days.”
That, along with his backing of the Egyptian proposal and condemnation of last month’s kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers, has eroded Mr. Abbas’s support in the West Bank.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said in an early-morning briefing that intense fighting had continued overnight in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaiya, where more than 60 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers died in the clashes Sunday. Colonel Lerner said that 10 Hamas fighters were killed Monday in Shejaiya, and that six underground tunnels had been “completely demolished” across Gaza in the past 24 hours. A total of 16 tunnels with 43 entry points had been uncovered since the start of the ground invasion Thursday night, he said.
“Ever since the beginning of the attack in Gaza he has become for a large number of Palestinians a persona non grata, somebody that is not relevant,” Hamed Qawasmeh, a Palestinian activist in the West Bank city of Hebron, said of President Abbas. “As a Palestinian street, now everybody is just talking about the resistance — Hamas, Hamas.”
The latest tunnel incursion unfolded Sunday morning near kibbutz Nir Am, a community of 400 people established before the state of Israel. Micha Ben-Hillel, who has lived on the kibbutz for half a century, said he heard heavy gunfire throughout the night but “had no idea what it was about.” Kibbutz security officials informed him about 8 a.m. that militants had exited a tunnel about 500 yards from the community’s center.
But Shlomo Brom, director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian relations at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, said that Mr. Abbas’s role — based on the pact his Palestine Liberation Organization signed with Hamas in April — is the most promising path to lasting change in Gaza.
“When our kids were younger we used to have picnics there – there’s a nice forest there, we have pine trees, and that’s actually where the battle took place,” said Mr. Ben-Hillel, 68, who teaches English. “It’s quite shocking how different the situation is today than it used to be.”
“Because of the change in the power relationship between these different actors in the Middle East, it is possible to create a more effective process of limiting Hamas and other armed groups’ buildup in the Gaza Strip,” Mr. Brom said, noting that the Arab League and the United States had joined Mr. Abbas in backing Egypt’s initial proposal. “But the fact of the matter is that Israel has decided that its strategy is not a strategy of resolution of the conflict, but it is a strategy of managing the conflict.”
Mr. Ben-Hillel said that about three-quarters of the kibbutz residents had left in recent days to stay in hotels or with relatives elsewhere in Israel, but that his family had stayed, in part because his wife, who was born on Nir Am, is in charge of caring for its elderly residents. One is her own father, Nissan Tsuri, 99, who Mr. Ben-Hillel said was commander of the kibbutz in 1948.
“He doesn’t run away from these rockets, doesn’t go to the safe room,” the son-in-law said. “He says it was worse during the War of Independence.”
