By Reuters,
Gaza : Israel ceased fire in the Gaza Strip on Sunday after declaring victory but Hamas guerrillas said the war that has cost 1,200 Palestinian lives would go on.
As 2 a.m. (12 a.m. British time) passed and the cease-fire came into effect, Israeli aircraft droned overhead and occasional flares lit the night sky over Gaza.
But the explosions and gunfire of the past three weeks appeared to have been silenced for now.
However, by shunning a negotiated truce with Hamas that had been the goal of mediation by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert left Gaza’s Islamist rulers vowing to keep firing rockets at Israel until it pulled its troops out again and ended its trade blockade on the enclave.
Within minutes of Olmert announcing a unilateral cease-fire to start within hours, several missiles hit southern Israel, causing no injuries. However, there were no subsequent strikes.
Twenty-two days after going to war to end rocket fire that was undermining support for the governing coalition before a February election, Olmert told Israelis in a televised address: “Conditions have been created whereby the goals set at the launch of the operation have been more than fully achieved.”
He said Hamas was “badly beaten” and its ability to fire rockets at southern Israeli towns had been severely limited.
Olmert also cited what he called internationally backed understandings with Egypt, the Gaza Strip’s southern neighbour, on preventing Hamas from rearming through smuggling tunnels.
After the deaths of perhaps more than 700 civilians, many of Gaza’s 1.5 million people are desperate for a respite.
But Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said as long as Israel kept troops in Gaza and its borders sealed, fighting would go on.
“These constitute acts of war so this won’t mean an end to resistance,” he said.
Olmert said the troops would remain in place and hit back if the Palestinians tried to fight on: “If our enemies decide the blows they’ve been dealt are not sufficient and they are interested in continuing the fight, Israel will be prepared for such and feel free to continue to react with force.”
CEASE-FIRE FOR OBAMA
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed the cease-fire but also urged Israel to pull out its forces from Gaza rapidly. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had spoken up for what Israel saw as its right to self-defence despite the civilian casualties, said she hoped for a durable cease-fire and a long-term settlement for the problems of Gaza.
Rice and President George W. Bush are stepping down and many analysts believe Israel, eager for smooth relations from the outset with the new president, has been keen to end the fighting before Barack Obama takes over the White House on Tuesday.
Despite the lack of any clear deal at this stage, Mubarak invited European leaders to a short-notice summit on Sunday that is meant to come up with ways to bolster the truce in Gaza and to ease the plight of the civilian population crammed into the 45-km (28-mile) sliver of coast.
Most of those, their nerves shredded and sleepless with fear and bereavement, just want the war to be over.
“We do not care how, we want a cease-fire. We want to go back to our homes. Our children need to go back to sleep in their beds,” said Ali Hassan, 34 and a father of five, in Gaza city.
Figures from an independent Palestinian human rights group put the number of civilians killed in three weeks of aerial bombardment and a two-week-long ground offensive backed by tanks and artillery at over 700.
Hundreds of fighters have also died. Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed. Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry said some 5,300 wounded had been treated, many at sanctions-hit and chaotic hospitals.
It put the death toll to Saturday at 1,206, including 410 children.
Of these, two young boys were killed early on Saturday at a United Nations-run school where hundreds of people had taken refuge. U.N. officials called for war crimes inquiries.
Israel accuses Hamas fighters of hiding among civilians and says its troops do all they can to avoid hitting non-combatants in a territory where half the population is aged under 18. Olmert said he apologised for the suffering of the innocent.
BLOCKADE CONCERNS
Israel launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip on December 27 and ground troops pushed into the coastal enclave a week later, saying its main war aim was an end to rocket fire that had killed 18 people in Israel over the previous eight years.
Without an accord with Hamas, diplomats said they feared Israel would let only a trickle of goods into Gaza, hampering reconstruction and creating more hardship for its people.
“So long as there is no agreement on the crossings, I frankly cannot see the end to the hostilities,” said Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israel’s left-leaning Labour foreign minister when peace talks with the Palestinians collapsed in 2001.
Mubarak will host Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and U.N. chief Ban in Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday, along with the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Turkey, Italy and Spain.
The road ahead for the Obama administration in promoting a peace settlement that has eluded Israelis and Palestinians for the 60 years since Israel was established remains bumpy.
Hamas, which won a parliamentary election in 2006 and seized Gaza from Abbas’s forces a year later, is shunned by the West but remains a popular force in both Gaza and the West Bank.
It is unclear what effect this month’s war will have on the division between the Palestinians factions.
Without an end to the bitter rift between Hamas and Abbas, a deal with Israel on establishing a Palestinian state still seems distant to many.