July 15, 2014
Brief Lull in Gaza Ends as Rockets Fly and Israel Resumes Strikes
Jodi Rudoren and Anne Barnard
New York Times, July 15, 2014
JERUSALEM — Egypt’s proposal for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed Tuesday only a few hours after the Israelis had accepted it, as Palestinian militants in Gaza launched a barrage of rockets into Israeli territory. Israel responded with another round of airstrikes in Gaza, where eight days of Israeli bombings have killed nearly 200 people.
Israel announced at 9 a.m. Tuesday that it had accepted the Egyptian initiative unilaterally but abandoned it after nearly 50 rockets were lobbed into Israel from Gaza in what was assumed to be a rejection by Hamas and its affiliates. By 3 p.m., Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, confirmed that “we’ve resumed some striking in Gaza.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that its resumed aerial assaults had hit 30 targets, including 20 concealed rocket launchers, tunnels, weapons storage facilities and “operational infrastructure” of Islamic Jihad, a Gaza-based militant group aligned with Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said earlier that he would respond with force if the rockets did not stop.
Photo
Smoke from rockets fired toward Israel from near Gaza City on Tuesday. CreditThomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“We agreed to the Egyptian proposal in order to give the opportunity to deal with demilitarization of the strip from missiles, rockets and tunnels through diplomatic means,” Mr. Netanyahu said after a meeting with the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “But if Hamas does not accept the cease-fire proposal, as it looks now, Israel will have all the international legitimacy in order to achieve the desired quiet.”
Leaders of Hamas did not officially respond to Israel’s acceptance of the Egyptian proposal, which was aimed at halting the aerial strikes that began on July 7 and called for Israeli and Palestinian delegations to travel to Cairo within 48 hours to negotiate further terms. Islamic Jihad said in a statement that the Egyptian proposal did not “meet the needs of our people and the conditions of the resistance, which was not consulted.”
Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas leader based in Cairo, said in a message posted on Twitter around the time the rockets were flying that the organization was still “consulting” and had “not issued an official position on the Egyptian initiative.”
A Twitter post, in Hebrew, by Hamas’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, took responsibility for the rockets that were fired at Israeli cities on Tuesday, adding, “We will continue to bombard until our conditions are met.”
The current hostilities, in which 185 Palestinians have been killed, and no Israelis, are the third intense flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza in less than six years. They began more than than two months after the spectacular collapse of American-brokered peace talks and a month after the swearing-in of a new Palestinian government that was based on a reconciliation pact with Hamas.
Tensions had been rising since the June 12 abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank, which Israel blamed on Hamas, and the July 2 kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian 16-year-old in an apparent revenge attack by extremist Jews.
On Tuesday, hospital officials in Gaza said they had admitted a man wounded in an Israeli strike after the cease-fire was supposed to have started. Lying on a stretcher at Shifa Hospital, the patient, Mahmoud Muhanna, 26, said he had been riding a motorbike to check on his family’s residence when an explosion flung him to the pavement, cracking his head.
He was admitted around noon, doctors said, and he said the explosion took place sometime after 11 a.m., although the Israeli military said it resumed its attacks only hours later; it was possible he was hit by an errant rocket fired from Gaza. “I heard there was a cease-fire,” he said, cringing as a doctor manipulated his leg. “I was fooled.” Still, Mr. Muhanna, asked if he still wanted a cease-fire to take hold, said, “Of course.”
Outside Shifa Hospital, which has treated many of the conflict’s worst casualties and become a focal point of mourning and defiance, several dozen people cheered as a rocket ripped skyward, leaving a white contrail.
“Ya Qassam, ya habib,” a few men chanted, referring with a term of endearment to the Hamas military brigades that fire the rockets. “Strike, strike Tel Aviv.”
In 2012, when an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire ended eight days of cross-border violence, the deal was celebrated as a Hamas victory with street parades, but on Tuesday, Hamas supporters viewed Egypt’s proposed truce with suspicion. Outside the hospital, a Hamas security officer, who gave only a nickname, Abu Mahmoud, pointed at the rocket and said, “This is our celebration.”
He referred to the cease-fire proposal as “only a way for Egypt to save face” and said bluntly, “We don’t accept it.”
Other residents in Gaza still held out hope for a cease-fire. “Who would want to be bombed?” said Dr. Ayman al Sahbani.
The question, residents say, is where a cease-fire would lead, and whether it would bring any change to Gaza. The Palestinian enclave has been occupied since 1967, and now, despite the pullout of Israeli settlers and troops in 2005, its borders, airspace and seas are controlled by Israel. There are tough restrictions that have effectively amounted to a blockade, keeping the movement of goods and people to a trickle.
“Every time they have a cease-fire, but then everything comes back: the siege, the closures,” said Wedad al-Jarba, who was at the hospital, where her 2-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Maher, was being admitted with a skull fracture. Israel “never agreed on anything real,” she said.
Maher was injured when an explosion struck around, hours before the pause in fire was to have taken effect, and he tumbled down 11 steps. He was first taken to a hospital in central Gaza, but had to be moved because it lacked the ability to perform a CT scan, due in part, doctors said, to the budget crisis and import restrictions.
The Egyptian proposal, which was embraced by the United States, the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority, calls for border crossings into Gaza to “be opened,” and for the movement of people and goods to be “facilitated once the security situation becomes stable on the ground.”
Photo
An Israeli rocket struck a house in Gaza City on Tuesday morning. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Some Israeli politicians criticized the cease-fire plan, saying that not enough damage had yet been inflicted on Hamas’s infrastructure and weapons caches.
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and a longtime advocate of a more intensive attack on Gaza, voted against accepting the Egyptian cease-fire proposal at an early Tuesday meeting of top ministers known as the security cabinet, as did Naftali Bennett, the economy minister. Mr. Lieberman said at an afternoon news conference that the current operation should only end with the Israeli military “controlling all of the Gaza Strip.”
“Israel must go all the way,” Mr. Lieberman told reporters. “A cease-fire is a tacit agreement that Hamas continue to build up its power.”
Uri Ariel, the housing minister who is in Mr. Bennett’s far-right party, called the decision “a strategic mistake akin to building a train without paving the last kilometer.” On Twitter, he cracked that previous Israeli operations in Gaza had led to quiet for three years and 18 months, while the latest calm lasted an hour — “impossible to say there is no progress.”
Danny Danon, the deputy defense minister and a frequent critic of Mr. Netanyahu from within the prime minister’s own Likud Party, had described the cease-fire as “a slap in the face of all the residents of Israel.”
And Isaac Herzog, the head of Israel’s Labor Party and leader of the opposition in Parliament, said: “If the cease-fire doesn’t lead to forward movement in the peace process it is useless.”
But some analysts had said there were no downsides to Israel’s embrace of the cease-fire proposal: The Egyptian cease-fire would either lead to a genuine calm that benefits both sides or, if Hamas rejected the terms, provide Israel with cover to continue the conflict.
“If Hamas looks at the cards it has been dealt — and they are very weak cards indeed — resuming military operations against Israel is not a good hand to play,” Michael B. Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, told reporters on Tuesday in a conference call organized by The Israel Project, an advocacy group.
Speaking before Israel abandoned the cease-fire, Secretary of State John Kerry, who was expected to return to Washington on Tuesday afternoon from Vienna, where he had been trying to iron out a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, criticized Hamas for continuing to fire rockets after the cease-fire was to have taken effect.
“I cannot condemn strongly enough the actions of Hamas in so brazenly firing rockets, in multiple numbers, in the face of a good-will effort,” Kerry said at a news conference.
Mr. Kerry said that it was important for Hamas not to “play politics” by taking military actions to build up its standing in the Arab world, and he also criticized the group for putting civilians in danger by conducting its operations in civilian neighborhoods.
He said that he had been prepared to fly to Cairo to help secure a cease-fire but had decided to return to Washington instead to give the Egyptian plan a chance. “I am prepared to fly back to the region tomorrow if I have to,” he said, if the Egyptian plan “does not work.”
The developments followed a relatively quiet night, in which the Israeli military bombed 25 sites in Gaza, killing five Palestinians in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; about 1,400 others have been wounded.
Ashraf al-Qedra, the Health Ministry spokesman, and local journalists said that Ismail and Mohammed Najjar, relatives in their 40s who worked as guards on agricultural land in a former Israeli settlement in Khan Younis, were killed early Tuesday. In Rafah, drone strikes killed Atwa al-Amour, a 63-year-old farmer, and Bushra Zourob, 53, a woman who was near the target, a man on a motorbike, who was wounded.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said Tuesday morning that Israel had hit 1,609 targets in Gaza during the eight-day operation, and counted 1,090 rockets fired into Israel, 193 of which had been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system.
That did not include the assault that began after Israel’s acceptance of the cease-fire proposal: nearly 50 rockets were fired between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., the military said, mainly aimed at southern areas but also as far north as Haifa and Rehovot.
In Ashdod, a city not far from Gaza that has been pummeled throughout the week, a villa overlooking the sea was directly hit and five surrounding buildings were sprayed with shrapnel.
Gay Dery, 30, had just woken up and did not make it into the bomb shelter — he was lucky, he said, because it ended up being filled with flying debris. Johanna Hizkiya, 32, was still trembling an hour later as a soldier held her child near their home, which was covered in broken glass.
“Everything just flew in the air on us,” Ms. Hizkiya said. “The door flew.”
Brief Lull in Gaza Ends as Rockets Fly and Israel Resumes Strikes
Jodi Rudoren and Anne Barnard
New York Times, July 15, 2014
JERUSALEM — Egypt’s proposal for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed Tuesday only a few hours after the Israelis had accepted it, as Palestinian militants in Gaza launched a barrage of rockets into Israeli territory. Israel responded with another round of airstrikes in Gaza, where eight days of Israeli bombings have killed nearly 200 people.
Israel announced at 9 a.m. Tuesday that it had accepted the Egyptian initiative unilaterally but abandoned it after nearly 50 rockets were lobbed into Israel from Gaza in what was assumed to be a rejection by Hamas and its affiliates. By 3 p.m., Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, confirmed that “we’ve resumed some striking in Gaza.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that its resumed aerial assaults had hit 30 targets, including 20 concealed rocket launchers, tunnels, weapons storage facilities and “operational infrastructure” of Islamic Jihad, a Gaza-based militant group aligned with Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said earlier that he would respond with force if the rockets did not stop.
Photo
Smoke from rockets fired toward Israel from near Gaza City on Tuesday. CreditThomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“We agreed to the Egyptian proposal in order to give the opportunity to deal with demilitarization of the strip from missiles, rockets and tunnels through diplomatic means,” Mr. Netanyahu said after a meeting with the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “But if Hamas does not accept the cease-fire proposal, as it looks now, Israel will have all the international legitimacy in order to achieve the desired quiet.”
Leaders of Hamas did not officially respond to Israel’s acceptance of the Egyptian proposal, which was aimed at halting the aerial strikes that began on July 7 and called for Israeli and Palestinian delegations to travel to Cairo within 48 hours to negotiate further terms. Islamic Jihad said in a statement that the Egyptian proposal did not “meet the needs of our people and the conditions of the resistance, which was not consulted.”
Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas leader based in Cairo, said in a message posted on Twitter around the time the rockets were flying that the organization was still “consulting” and had “not issued an official position on the Egyptian initiative.”
A Twitter post, in Hebrew, by Hamas’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, took responsibility for the rockets that were fired at Israeli cities on Tuesday, adding, “We will continue to bombard until our conditions are met.”
The current hostilities, in which 185 Palestinians have been killed, and no Israelis, are the third intense flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza in less than six years. They began more than than two months after the spectacular collapse of American-brokered peace talks and a month after the swearing-in of a new Palestinian government that was based on a reconciliation pact with Hamas.
Tensions had been rising since the June 12 abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank, which Israel blamed on Hamas, and the July 2 kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian 16-year-old in an apparent revenge attack by extremist Jews.
On Tuesday, hospital officials in Gaza said they had admitted a man wounded in an Israeli strike after the cease-fire was supposed to have started. Lying on a stretcher at Shifa Hospital, the patient, Mahmoud Muhanna, 26, said he had been riding a motorbike to check on his family’s residence when an explosion flung him to the pavement, cracking his head.
He was admitted around noon, doctors said, and he said the explosion took place sometime after 11 a.m., although the Israeli military said it resumed its attacks only hours later; it was possible he was hit by an errant rocket fired from Gaza. “I heard there was a cease-fire,” he said, cringing as a doctor manipulated his leg. “I was fooled.” Still, Mr. Muhanna, asked if he still wanted a cease-fire to take hold, said, “Of course.”
Outside Shifa Hospital, which has treated many of the conflict’s worst casualties and become a focal point of mourning and defiance, several dozen people cheered as a rocket ripped skyward, leaving a white contrail.
“Ya Qassam, ya habib,” a few men chanted, referring with a term of endearment to the Hamas military brigades that fire the rockets. “Strike, strike Tel Aviv.”
In 2012, when an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire ended eight days of cross-border violence, the deal was celebrated as a Hamas victory with street parades, but on Tuesday, Hamas supporters viewed Egypt’s proposed truce with suspicion. Outside the hospital, a Hamas security officer, who gave only a nickname, Abu Mahmoud, pointed at the rocket and said, “This is our celebration.”
He referred to the cease-fire proposal as “only a way for Egypt to save face” and said bluntly, “We don’t accept it.”
Other residents in Gaza still held out hope for a cease-fire. “Who would want to be bombed?” said Dr. Ayman al Sahbani.
The question, residents say, is where a cease-fire would lead, and whether it would bring any change to Gaza. The Palestinian enclave has been occupied since 1967, and now, despite the pullout of Israeli settlers and troops in 2005, its borders, airspace and seas are controlled by Israel. There are tough restrictions that have effectively amounted to a blockade, keeping the movement of goods and people to a trickle.
“Every time they have a cease-fire, but then everything comes back: the siege, the closures,” said Wedad al-Jarba, who was at the hospital, where her 2-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Maher, was being admitted with a skull fracture. Israel “never agreed on anything real,” she said.
Maher was injured when an explosion struck around, hours before the pause in fire was to have taken effect, and he tumbled down 11 steps. He was first taken to a hospital in central Gaza, but had to be moved because it lacked the ability to perform a CT scan, due in part, doctors said, to the budget crisis and import restrictions.
The Egyptian proposal, which was embraced by the United States, the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority, calls for border crossings into Gaza to “be opened,” and for the movement of people and goods to be “facilitated once the security situation becomes stable on the ground.”
Photo
An Israeli rocket struck a house in Gaza City on Tuesday morning. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Some Israeli politicians criticized the cease-fire plan, saying that not enough damage had yet been inflicted on Hamas’s infrastructure and weapons caches.
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and a longtime advocate of a more intensive attack on Gaza, voted against accepting the Egyptian cease-fire proposal at an early Tuesday meeting of top ministers known as the security cabinet, as did Naftali Bennett, the economy minister. Mr. Lieberman said at an afternoon news conference that the current operation should only end with the Israeli military “controlling all of the Gaza Strip.”
“Israel must go all the way,” Mr. Lieberman told reporters. “A cease-fire is a tacit agreement that Hamas continue to build up its power.”
Uri Ariel, the housing minister who is in Mr. Bennett’s far-right party, called the decision “a strategic mistake akin to building a train without paving the last kilometer.” On Twitter, he cracked that previous Israeli operations in Gaza had led to quiet for three years and 18 months, while the latest calm lasted an hour — “impossible to say there is no progress.”
Danny Danon, the deputy defense minister and a frequent critic of Mr. Netanyahu from within the prime minister’s own Likud Party, had described the cease-fire as “a slap in the face of all the residents of Israel.”
And Isaac Herzog, the head of Israel’s Labor Party and leader of the opposition in Parliament, said: “If the cease-fire doesn’t lead to forward movement in the peace process it is useless.”
But some analysts had said there were no downsides to Israel’s embrace of the cease-fire proposal: The Egyptian cease-fire would either lead to a genuine calm that benefits both sides or, if Hamas rejected the terms, provide Israel with cover to continue the conflict.
“If Hamas looks at the cards it has been dealt — and they are very weak cards indeed — resuming military operations against Israel is not a good hand to play,” Michael B. Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, told reporters on Tuesday in a conference call organized by The Israel Project, an advocacy group.
Speaking before Israel abandoned the cease-fire, Secretary of State John Kerry, who was expected to return to Washington on Tuesday afternoon from Vienna, where he had been trying to iron out a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, criticized Hamas for continuing to fire rockets after the cease-fire was to have taken effect.
“I cannot condemn strongly enough the actions of Hamas in so brazenly firing rockets, in multiple numbers, in the face of a good-will effort,” Kerry said at a news conference.
Mr. Kerry said that it was important for Hamas not to “play politics” by taking military actions to build up its standing in the Arab world, and he also criticized the group for putting civilians in danger by conducting its operations in civilian neighborhoods.
He said that he had been prepared to fly to Cairo to help secure a cease-fire but had decided to return to Washington instead to give the Egyptian plan a chance. “I am prepared to fly back to the region tomorrow if I have to,” he said, if the Egyptian plan “does not work.”
The developments followed a relatively quiet night, in which the Israeli military bombed 25 sites in Gaza, killing five Palestinians in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; about 1,400 others have been wounded.
Ashraf al-Qedra, the Health Ministry spokesman, and local journalists said that Ismail and Mohammed Najjar, relatives in their 40s who worked as guards on agricultural land in a former Israeli settlement in Khan Younis, were killed early Tuesday. In Rafah, drone strikes killed Atwa al-Amour, a 63-year-old farmer, and Bushra Zourob, 53, a woman who was near the target, a man on a motorbike, who was wounded.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said Tuesday morning that Israel had hit 1,609 targets in Gaza during the eight-day operation, and counted 1,090 rockets fired into Israel, 193 of which had been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system.
That did not include the assault that began after Israel’s acceptance of the cease-fire proposal: nearly 50 rockets were fired between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., the military said, mainly aimed at southern areas but also as far north as Haifa and Rehovot.
In Ashdod, a city not far from Gaza that has been pummeled throughout the week, a villa overlooking the sea was directly hit and five surrounding buildings were sprayed with shrapnel.
Gay Dery, 30, had just woken up and did not make it into the bomb shelter — he was lucky, he said, because it ended up being filled with flying debris. Johanna Hizkiya, 32, was still trembling an hour later as a soldier held her child near their home, which was covered in broken glass.
“Everything just flew in the air on us,” Ms. Hizkiya said. “The door flew.”
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