This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-strip-casualties.html

The article has changed 16 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 3 Version 4
In a Grim Game of Numbers, Israel and Palestinians Vie for Advantage Israel Faces Pressure to Halt Gaza War
(about 3 hours later)
JERUSALEM — The grim tallies from Gaza and Israel pour in each morning, dockets of death, destruction and damage that, with the war entering its 16th day, begin to seem almost routine. JERUSALEM — Israel faced new political and economic pressures on Wednesday to negotiate a halt to the 16-day-old Gaza war, with its rising toll of death and destruction, as cease-fire talks ground forward and the Israeli tourism industry was upended as major foreign airlines extended their suspension of flights over fears of Palestinian rocket fire.
On Wednesday, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said his country had carried out 200 airstrikes in the last 24 hours and 3,250 since the operation began on July 8. Palestinian militants, he said, had launched 2,159 rockets in the same period, 97 of them the day before, which he called “a substantial decline” from a daily average of 143. Secretary of State John Kerry, whose efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement collapsed this year, conducted a whirlwind tour of diplomacy, holding intensive talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after having met in the occupied West Bank with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. But for the moment, the prospects for a cease-fire seemed remote.
Two more Israeli soldiers had been killed, he said, bringing the total to 29. By afternoon, a foreign laborer in a field near Ashkelon was killed by a rocket, bringing the number of civilian deaths on the Israeli side to three. “We will continue to push for this cease-fire,” Mr. Kerry said in Ramallah, where Mr. Abbas is based. “We have in the last 24 hours made some progress in moving toward that goal.” But several hours later Mr. Kerry shook hands with a grim-faced Mr. Netanyahu at the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces in Tel Aviv. Neither of them took questions.
The Gaza-based Health Ministry put the Palestinian death toll at 632 from the beginning of the escalation through 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, including 132 children, 66 women, and 36 elderly men. The toll would soon climb. Witnesses reported heavy clashes and intense artillery fire in Khuza’a, a town of about 10,000 people in the southeast of the strip. The goal, Mr. Kerry said earlier, was not just a cease-fire but the basis for a “sustainable process going forward” that would address some of the long-term grievances of the Palestinians in Gaza, and prevent the recurrent fighting between the Israelis and the militants of Hamas and affiliated groups in the congested enclave.
Five Palestinians were killed in the fighting there, health officials said: two children, two brothers ages 23 and 25, and a 60-year-old man. By noon, the Health Ministry raised the total death toll to 642, with 4,120 injured. Israeli officials have talked increasingly in recent days about the need for the “demilitarization” of Gaza, particularly the destruction of its tunnel network, perhaps under international auspices. “We cannot go to a cease-fire without resolving the tunnels,” Yitzhak Aharonvich, the public security minister, said on Army Radio. “We can have a cease-fire while dealing with the tunnels, but we cannot accept a situation where the tunnels are used by the terrorists as an entrance into Israel.”
The competing efforts by Israel and Palestinian officials to direct the narrative of this conflict are made that much more complicated by the hundreds of reporters on the ground providing almost instantaneous reports of the fighting and the resulting casualties and by the thousands of bloggers, activists and others blasting out information and opinions on social media. The intensified diplomacy came as Israel reported three more Israeli soldiers were killed, all by explosive devices, in Gaza on Wednesday, bringing the total to 32; a foreign laborer was also felled by a rocket that hit farmland near the city of Ashkelon in the afternoon, the third civilian casualty on the Israeli side.
Like every other day since the conflict began, Wednesday began with almost a blur of developments and the likelihood of more to come, each with the potential to become a skirmish in the battle for public opinion and support around the world. The Gaza-based Health Ministry put the Palestinian death toll at 661 and 4,120 wounded. The deaths included more than 132 children, 66 women, and 36 elderly men. Witnesses reported heavy clashes and intense artillery fire in Khuza’a, a town of about 10,000 people in the southeast of Gaza, portending more Palestinian casualties.
On the diplomatic front, Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Israel and was scheduled to meet with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at a hotel in Jerusalem; then with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank city of Ramallah; and, later, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his military headquarters in Tel Aviv. Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said Wednesday morning his country had carried out 200 airstrikes in the previous 24 hours and 3,250 since the operation began on July 8. Palestinian militants, he said, had launched 2,159 rockets in the same period, 97 of them the day before, which he called “a substantial decline” from a daily average of 143.
Reporters in Jerusalem get their first briefing from the Israeli military, most days, at 7:30 a.m.; preceded on Wednesday — at least for The New York Times — by a wake-up call seven minutes earlier from a soldier in the military’s extensive public relations apparatus. Despite Israeli government assertions that its airports were safe, even though a rocket from Gaza had exploded near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, the country's main gateway, earlier in the week, the unexpected decree on Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington temporarily banning United States carriers from flying to or from Israel had a profound ripple effect. The F.A.A. extended the decree on Wednesday. Most major European carriers also suspended flights.
The Palestine Liberation Organization sends out a daily “Gaza Under Fire” report by email, usually in the afternoon. Wednesday’s reported that, as of noon, 655 people had been killed since the operation’s onset, 4,220 wounded and 1,090 homes demolished. More than 19,000 homes had been damaged, it said, along with 90 schools, six hospitals, six health clinics, 64 mosques — three were destroyed — and eight government buildings. The 14-page report listed the names, and in most cases the locations and ages, of 584 people killed since July 13. “The answer to Israel’s security is not the collective punishment of Palestinians,” was written underneath in bold, capital letters. While Israel’s national carrier, El Al, added larger planes and more flights to its schedule on Wednesday to accommodate passengers stranded by cancellations, El Al already was bracing for tens of millions of dollars in losses. Tourism professionals were glum, confronting an unexpected aviation restriction imposed from abroad.
The United Nations had said Tuesday that 117,000 displaced people were sheltering in 80 of its schools, and that 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza had “no or very limited access to water or sanitation services.” “Who would want to fly into an airport that the top aviation authorities say is dangerous?” Moshe Mizrahi, who works in the tourism industry, was quoted as saying by The Times of Israel website. “When this is over, the airlines and hotels are going to have to do some major work to bring people back here.”
Wednesday morning, Gaza City was quieter than usual, but Israeli navy gunboats fired at the coastline all day. There were also a lot of shooting and explosions between Jabaliya, a refugee camp in the north of the strip, and Khan Younis, a city in the south. A flood of families headed toward Khan Younis from the nearby villages of Abasan al-Kabera, Abasan al-Asghira and Bani Suheila, and a local hospital was receiving many wounded people from those places. The fighting has exerted no significant impact yet on Israel’s vibrant stock market, and its currency, the shekel, has been stable throughout the latest upsurge in the conflict. But the Israelis have begun to feel economic pain in other ways. With Israel’s mobilization of 59,000 reservists for possible duty in Gaza, many businesses are missing employees and many shops in the southern area near Gaza have been closed.
Adding further pressure on the combatants to halt the fighting, the United Nations’ top human rights official, Navi Pillay, said Wednesday that there was a “strong possibility” that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes with indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The council, meeting in Geneva, voted to conduct an inquiry.
Ms. Pillay cited Israeli airstrikes on civilian homes in Gaza and the shelling of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital two days earlier, which killed four people, as examples of actions that suggest “a strong possibility that international humanitarian law has been violated in a manner that could amount to war crimes.”
She also condemned Hamas and other militant groups for attacks on Israeli civilians. And she said it was unacceptable to place military assets in densely populated areas or to launch attacks from then. “The principles of distinction and precaution are clearly not being observed by such indiscriminate attacks on civilians by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups,” she said.
The United Nations said Tuesday that 117,000 displaced people in Gaza were sheltering in 80 of its schools, and that 1.2 million residents in Gaza had “no or very limited access to water or sanitation services.”
Wednesday morning, Gaza City was quieter than usual, but Israeli navy gunboats fired at the coastline all day. There were also a lot of shootings and explosions between Jabaliya, a refugee camp in the north of the strip, and Khan Younis, a city in the south. A flood of families headed toward Khan Younis from the nearby villages of Abasan al-Kabera, Abasan al-Asghira and Bani Suheila, and a local hospital was receiving many wounded people from those places.
Colonel Lerner, the Israeli military spokesman, confirmed that most of the fighting remained in areas on the periphery of the Gaza Strip and in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaiya, where 13 soldiers and at least 60 Palestinians were killed Sunday and fierce combat has continued since. He said 30 militants had been killed in the last 24 hours, for a total of 210 — Palestinians put the number of fighters much lower — and that 28 underground tunnels with 68 entry points had been “exposed,” and six of the tunnels “demolished.”Colonel Lerner, the Israeli military spokesman, confirmed that most of the fighting remained in areas on the periphery of the Gaza Strip and in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaiya, where 13 soldiers and at least 60 Palestinians were killed Sunday and fierce combat has continued since. He said 30 militants had been killed in the last 24 hours, for a total of 210 — Palestinians put the number of fighters much lower — and that 28 underground tunnels with 68 entry points had been “exposed,” and six of the tunnels “demolished.”
“We are meeting resistance around the tunnels, they are clearly trying to protect these assets, as far as they’re concerned,” Colonel Lerner said. “Shejaiya has turned out to be a more substantial, fortified position, which explains, perhaps, why they are putting so much effort into defending it.”
A senior military intelligence official, in a separate morning conference call, told reporters that Israeli forces were encountering “quite advanced” weapons systems, including Russian-made Kornet and RPG-29 antitank weapons, which he said were probably smuggled through Iran and Syria. Hamas was also using snipers and improvised explosive devices, he said: booby traps in tunnels, suicide bombers in the streets, and explosives strapped to animals.
“The way of fighting is completely the way that some of your armies and forces saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and what we experienced in other places, Lebanon,” the official said. “Underground infrastructure, hiding, and as much as they can fighting from a standoff position, not face-to-face fighting, because in that case they know they have no chance.”