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Israel Agrees to Extension of Cease-Fire, but Hamas Balks Israel Agrees to Extension of Cease-Fire, but Hamas Balks
(about 1 hour later)
JERUSALEM — Israel’s top ministers decided Saturday night to extend a humanitarian halt to hostilities in the Gaza Strip for 24 hours, but said their troops would continue to operate to destroy tunnels from Gaza into its territory during Sunday’s pause. JERUSALEM — When a temporary cease-fire began on Saturday morning, Akram Qassim joined the throngs of Palestinians who emerged from their homes and temporary shelters. But when he reached his extended family’s three-story building, he found only a crater left by an Israeli airstrike.
The decision came despite continued fire from Gaza into Israel during Israel’s initial four-hour extension of a 12-hour humanitarian pause on Saturday that both sides had agreed to at the request of the United Nations.
Three mortars landed in open areas near Gaza just as the original lull was expiring at 8 p.m. Before midnight, more than a dozen rockets were fired at Israel, four of them intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system.
A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, rejected the expansion of the pause until midnight Sunday. “Any humanitarian cease-fire that doesn’t secure withdrawal of occupation soldiers from inside Gaza’s border, allow citizens back into homes and secure the evacuation of injuries is unacceptable,” Mr. Zuhri said. Earlier, Hamas had taken credit for sending two rockets toward Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military had made clear it would not withdraw from what it called “defensive positions” during the lull, and on Saturday night warned Gaza residents “not to return to previously evacuated areas.”
“Those who ignore these warnings are placing themselves at risk and are jeopardizing their own safety,” the military said in a statement.
In announcing the 24-hour extension just before midnight Saturday, a senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “Obviously our soldiers can protect themselves if they are attacked, and obviously we will continue to work on the tunnels,” an extensive network built by Hamas to sneak fighters into Israel.
The Israeli military said it had found four new tunnel shafts during Saturday’s pause. Since the ground operation began July 17, it said, it has uncovered 31 tunnels and destroyed 15 of them.
Families across the Gaza Strip emerged from shelters and returned to their homes during Saturday’s 12-hour cease-fire to survey the damage to their neighborhoods, collect belongings and help dig bodies from the rubble.
As the cease-fire expired at 8 p.m., Israel agreed to continue the lull for four hours, until midnight, while its security cabinet met to consider the United Nations request for a 24-hour extension, which it ultimately accepted.
But even as the ministers were meeting, sirens signaling incoming rockets continued to sound over central and southern cities.
Secretary of State John Kerry, meeting in Paris with Arab and European foreign ministers, had pressed for an extension of the 12-hour humanitarian pause that both sides would accept. He repeated his argument that any temporary truce needed to be followed by an enduring solution that would address the Palestinians’ desire to break free of the economic embargo of Gaza, as well as Israel’s security needs. Chief among those needs are a halt to rocket fire by Palestinian militants on Israeli cities and towns and the destruction of the tunnel network.
“I understand that Israel can’t have a cease-fire” in which “the tunnels are never going to be dealt with,” Mr. Kerry said. “The tunnels have to be dealt with. We understand that. We are working at that.”
“By the same token, the Palestinians can’t have a cease-fire in which they think the status quo is going to stay,” he said. “Palestinians need to live with dignity, with some freedom, with goods that can come in and out, and they need a life that is free from the current restraints.”
Mr. Kerry met with diplomats from Turkey, Qatar, Germany, Britain, and Italy, along with a representative of the European Union.
He later met separately with Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah, the Qatari foreign minister, and Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister. Qatar and Turkey support Hamas and have served as intermediaries with Khaled Meshal, the group’s political head, who resides in Doha.
The secretary of state, who left Paris for Washington Saturday night, seemed to be hoping that a succession of short truces strung together might yield enough latitude to begin unwinding the conflict.
Palestinians in Gaza got a taste of what that might look like during the cease-fire on Saturday.
Here in Beit Hanoun, a hard-hit town in northern Gaza, Akram Qassim, 53, stared in disbelief at a huge smoking crater strewn with rubble and twisted metal from an Israeli airstrike, all that remained of the three-story house he had shared with his two brothers and their families.
“I expected that maybe a shell had hit it and caused some damage,” Mr. Qassim said. “But this is an earthquake.”“I expected that maybe a shell had hit it and caused some damage,” Mr. Qassim said. “But this is an earthquake.”
Four houses clustered nearby had also been reduced to piles of rubble; power lines that had been blown from their poles snaked across streets; and the air smelled of a dead horse lying in an empty lot. Saturday’s cease-fire provided the first daylong relief from violence for civilians on both sides of the conflict since the start of the 19-day war between Israel and Palestinian militants. The 12-hour lull granted people an ability to move, with Israelis visiting their troops and Palestinians discovering damaged neighborhoods and dead bodies.
“Are all these houses tunnels?” Mr. Qassim asked. “Is that dead horse a tunnel?” More than 140 bodies were recovered across Gaza on Saturday — including 21 members of one family — raising the Palestinian death toll to 1,139, most of them civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. On the Israeli side, 42 soldiers and three civilians have been killed.
The truce also allowed Palestinians to dig bodies from the rubble. More than 100 were recovered from battle zones across Gaza on Saturday, including 21 members of one family, driving the total Palestinian death toll to more than 1,020. On Saturday evening, Israel’s top ministers decided to extend the lull for 24 hours, but said Israeli troops would continue their efforts to destroy tunnels. Palestinian fighters renewed their rocket fire at Israel, and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, said it rejected any cease-fire that did not include the withdrawal of Israeli troops.
Five more Israeli soldiers were also reported killed, bringing the death toll on the Israeli side to 43, including three civilians. The vast destruction in communities across Gaza shocked residents who had fled their homes, and reactions to it could play a role in negotiations over the terms of a longer cease-fire.
For Palestinians, the majority of the dead have been civilians. Palestinians see the war as a new case of Israeli aggression and believe that Israel has done little to protect civilians or their property from the devastation wrought by its airstrikes. Israel has said its offensive is intended to halt rocket fire by Palestinian fighters and to destroy the extensive network of tunnels — some of them concrete-reinforced — that militants use for combat, smuggling, and sneaking fighters into Israel. This is likely to mean that the Israelis will insist on continuing strict border controls on materials that could be used to build more tunnels.
But Hamas is known to place weapons and fighters in residential neighborhoods and other places where civilians gather, including mosques. But Hamas is seeking an agreement that would ease the movement of goods into Gaza from Israel and Egypt — a goal it seeks desperately and may fight to obtain.
In southern Israel, a rocket landed in an open field just as the cease-fire was starting at 8 a.m., but residents who had spent much of the last weeks sheltering in safe rooms ventured out cautiously throughout the day. “If there is an agreement for a cease-fire, that’s great,” said Mohammed Abu Jama in Al Zanna, an area of central Gaza where power lines had been blown down, an abandoned Israeli military trailer stood in the street and dozens of houses bore the scars of intense clashes.
People stopped by beaches in Ashdod and Ashkelon for short visits, Israel Radio reported, and television news contrasted footage taken Saturday of crowded cafes with that from last week when all such establishments were empty. But Mr. Abu Jama, whose own house was damaged, said any agreement had to include an opening of the crossings that tightly control all movement in and out of Gaza.
“I was very hesitant, because we know who we’re dealing with,” a beachgoer identified only as Sigalit said in a radio interview. “In the end I decided to go out and see if people were around.” “And if there is no agreement, we want the resistance to continue fighting,” he said.
At Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, a barber came to give haircuts to wounded soldiers. In Maslul, a small community not far from a staging area for soldiers in the Gaza operation, residents had set up 10 barbecue grills to serve the troops, along with showers and even a karaoke corner, Israel Radio reported. Visits to Al Zanna and two other front-line neighborhoods on Saturday revealed destruction that in places stretched for blocks, with walls punctured by artillery shells, buildings reduced to rubble and streets erased by yawning craters.
Elsewhere, volunteers helped farmers pick peppers from unguarded fields. The destruction in the Shejaiya neighborhood of eastern Gaza City, site of some of the worst fighting, was so extensive that in some places it was impossible to spot an undamaged building. Scores of buildings, including a hospital and a mosque, had also been damaged or destroyed here in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
Israeli authorities said that during the initial cease-fire they were coordinating with international organizations to evacuate wounded Palestinians, distribute food and repair power lines and water pipes broken in battle. As news of the pause spread though Gaza on Saturday morning, Mariam Fayyad joined the crowds rushing to the area. Many spoke on cellphones with relatives elsewhere, wailing when they received reports of their destroyed homes.
As news of the pause spread through Gaza on Saturday via radio, phone calls, text messages and word of mouth, cars, horse carts and people on foot crowded the main road to Beit Hanoun. At one point, two men in black face masks who were carrying assault rifles approached from the opposite direction, suggesting that fighters were using the pause to change positions.
Many spoke on cellphones with relatives elsewhere, sometimes breaking down or wailing when they received reports of their destroyed homes. Entering her white, three-bedroom house surrounded by fruit trees, Ms. Fayyad let out a wail and ran from room to room, inspecting the damage. Artillery shells had punched holes in the walls and ceiling, doors had been blown from their hinges and rubble covered the floor. The metal bathtub, crumpled like a tin can, sat in the kitchen.
At one point, two men in black face masks and carrying assault rifles came walking from the opposite direction, suggesting that fighters were using the pause to change positions. “All the money we had went to this, everything we tired ourselves out for,” said her husband, Ibrahim. Both are teachers and had built the house from scratch, moving in two years ago, they said.
Realizing that the pause was only temporary, many families collected a few items from home to ease their continued displacement. Men strapped mattresses to the tops of cars and packed pillows and bottles of cooking gas in their trunks. One man salvaged a flat screen TV. A woman carried a garbage bag full of blankets and canned beans on her head. Tragedy also struck the al-Najjar family, whose house in central Gaza was struck by an Israeli airstrike before dawn on Saturday, killing 21 people.
“Bring a stretcher! Bring a stretcher!” yelled a man working with a group of medics and a bulldozer to remove bodies from a home that had been flattened in a recent airstrike. “I was on the balcony when the hit came, and I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up in the hospital,” said Hussein al-Najjar, who lost his father, mother, one brother, two sisters and two sons, ages 1 and 6, in the strike.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, could not explain the airstrike some 19 hours after it happened.
“We’ve been unable to determine the target at this time,” he said late Saturday, adding that militants in the area could have fired antitank missiles, drawing an Israeli response.
Israel says that it strives to avoid killing civilians and blames Hamas for putting them in danger by fighting from residential areas and storing weapons there.
Israeli troops remained in place across Gaza during the lull and continued to search for tunnels but did not advance or engage with Palestinian fighters. The Israeli authorities said that they coordinated with international organizations to evacuate wounded Palestinians, distribute food and repair utilities.
By Saturday morning, Israeli forces had found 31 tunnels and destroyed 15, Colonel Lerner said.
In southern Israel, where most of the rockets fired by Gaza militants have fallen during the war, the lull allowed residents who had spent recent weeks rushing to shelters to venture out. People visited beaches in Ashdod and Ashkelon, Israel Radio reported, and television news contrasted video footage of crowded cafes on Saturday with that from last week when the establishments were empty.
“I was very hesitant, because we know who we’re dealing with; in the end I decided to go out and see if people were around,” a beachgoer identified only as Sigalit said in a radio interview. “It’s fun, but there is still some fear. Let’s hope it continues so that we can enjoy ourselves a bit more.”
At Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, a barber gave haircuts to wounded soldiers. In Maslul, a small community not far from a staging area for the Gaza operation, residents set up 10 barbecue grills to serve the troops, along with showers and a karaoke corner, Israel Radio reported.
Back in Gaza, a group of men and a bulldozer worked to remove bodies from a house that had been flattened in an overnight airstrike.
“We have pulled out six so far and there are three left,” said Mohammed Nasser, who had relatives among the dead.“We have pulled out six so far and there are three left,” said Mohammed Nasser, who had relatives among the dead.
As the bulldozer dug, one of the dead was found with a Kalashnikov rifle at his side, suggesting that he — and perhaps the others — were fighters. Cries of “God is great!” erupted from the crowd as the body was carried to an ambulance. As the bulldozer dug, one of the dead was found with a Kalashnikov rifle at his side. Cries of “God is great!” erupted from the crowd as the body was carried to an ambulance.