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Israeli Cabinet Appears Ready to Declare a Gaza Cease-Fire
Israel’s security cabinet is expected to meet Saturday night to declare a cease-fire in Gaza and will keep its forces there in the short term while the next stage of an agreement with Egypt is worked out.
“It looks as if all the pieces of the puzzle are coming together,” Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Friday. “There will be discussions tomorrow morning, and it looks like a cabinet meeting will take place tomorrow night. Everyone is very upbeat.”
The most promising element for bringing the three-week conflict to a close occurred in Washington on Friday, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel signed an understanding on a range of steps the United States would take to stem the flow of new arms to Hamas from the Egyptian Sinai, mostly via tunnels.
The agreement came on the last business day of the Bush administration and set the stage for the Obama administration to play a more active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. President-elect Barack Obama and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton signed off on the plan, the State Department said.
Whether Hamas will comply with the terms of parallel talks with Egypt was unclear. At a meeting organized by Qatar, a top exiled Hamas leader rejected Israeli terms for a cease-fire and called for increased resistance.
“Israel will not be able to destroy our resistance, and the United States will not be able to dictate us their rules,” the leader, Khaled Meshal, said in defiant remarks broadcast worldwide. “Arab countries should help Hamas to fight against the death of civilian Palestinians.”
But the Gaza branch of Hamas, squabbling with exiles out of the line of Israeli fire, seems to have agreed to much of Egypt’s cease-fire proposal.
Fighting in Gaza continued Friday, despite the apparent progress toward ending it. Palestinian medical officials said the death toll had risen above 1,100 people, many of them civilians.
The cease-fire under discussion is more formal than the one that broke down late last month, when each side accused the other of failing to live up to its terms, and in some ways seems devised to overcome the last one’s weaknesses.
Unlike the last one, this will be written down, in Israel’s case, in the form of an agreement with Egypt and the understanding with the United States. Israel and Hamas do not speak officially but Egypt has been brokering terms between the two. Israel was unwilling to have an accord that might confer legitimacy on Hamas, which preaches Israel’s destruction.
The agreement hammered out in Washington would provide American technical assistance, as well as international monitors, to crack down on the tunnels. It would not, however, involve the deployment of American troops in the region. The composition of the monitoring force was not yet clear, a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The agreement stipulates that the United States would work to interdict weapons with its NATO partners, expanding significantly the responsibility to keep Hamas disarmed.
After meeting with Ms. Rice, Ms. Livni, who has been hawkish on continuing the assault aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from coming into Israel, stressed that the nation had met its war aims and was prepared to enter a cease-fire cautiously.
“Israel embarked on the campaign in order to change the equation and restore its deterrent capacity,” she told Israel Radio. “We did that a few days ago, in my opinion. It has to be put to the test. If Hamas shoots, we’ll have to continue. And if it shoots later on, we’ll have to embark on another campaign.”
The Bush administration agreed to the deal after consulting Mrs. Clinton and Gen. James L. Jones, who will be Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. Ms. Rice discussed the terms over lunch with Mrs. Clinton on Thursday, the State Department spokesman said, and briefed Mr. Obama by phone.
“It’s safe to assume that we wouldn’t have moved forward if we hadn’t done some careful consultations, prior to signing, with the incoming folks,” the spokesman, Sean McCormack, said.
The timing of the agreement, after a last effort of American diplomacy, struck some Middle East experts as symbolic of a Bush administration that had refused to engage in the peace process until late in its term, and has left its successors with little choice but to re-engage.
“They will inherit this agreement, which is critically important and will make them more engaged in the region than Bush was,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “This is the shape of things to come.”
Ms. Rice said the agreement was only supportive of broader negotiations being carried out by Egypt, and she refused to say when a cease-fire could actually take place and when the fighting in Gaza would stop.
“We are doing everything we can to bring it to an end,” she said.
In Gaza, Palestinians tried to recover Friday from a heavy assault from Israel the day before.
A funeral for a senior Hamas official, Interior Minister Said Siam, who was killed Thursday by an Israeli attack, turned into a mass rally in Gaza City. Thousands raised their fingers into the air as a speaker called out, “Let us say goodbye to one of the lions of Hamas!” Passers-by stopped, elderly women emerged from houses, and children stood on roofs and declared, “This is in the name of God!”
Gaza hospitals were struggling. They were damaged on Thursday by Israel, which said mortars had been fired at its forces from sites near the hospitals. CARE International and other global aid groups said they had resumed distribution after being forced to stop by the intense attacks of the previous day. They condemned Israel’s actions.
In Tal Al Hawa, a neighborhood in southwestern Gaza City where fighting was fiercest on Thursday, Israeli tanks withdrew, leaving a blighted landscape and several dozen more dead.
Palestinians reported that a mother and her five children - 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12 years old - had been killed in the Bureij refugee camp. Three riders on motorbikes, means of transport increasingly used by Hamas fighters, were also killed by missiles.
Israel stepped up military activity on Friday evening. Palestinian medical officials reported that at least 10 Palestinians had been killed in the Shajaiye section of Gaza City by a shell that hit a house of mourning. Four more people were killed in an attack on a house in Jabaliya, north of the city.
At the meeting in Qatar, the Hamas leader, Mr. Meshal, was joined by Iran and Syria in calls for all Muslim countries to break ties with Israel. Qatar and Mauritania, which have low-level ties with Israel, were reported to have said at the meeting that they were freezing those relations.
It was not clear what impact Mr. Meshal’s fiery speech would have on any cease-fire. But his presence before the emergency meeting underscored the continued evolution of power in the region away from state players aligned with the West, to non-state players, like Hamas, and their anti-Western benefactors who support a more direct and aggressive stance toward Israel.
The once dominant regional leadership of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Jordan tried to undermine this meeting, refusing to attend, and pressed other Arab states to stay away, too.
But it was those who boycotted the event who found themselves marginalized - at least for the day - as Mr. Meshal spoke before an audience that included representatives from Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Iran and about 10 other countries assembled for the meeting in Doha, Qatar’s capital.
A senior Egyptian official said that Hamas was unhappy with Israel’s plan to leave its forces in Gaza during a short cease-fire, but that it had accepted the idea of placing the Palestinian Authority in charge of the border crossing into Egypt and the presence of European monitors there. It was unclear how the divisions within Hamas as well as within the Arab world would affect negotiations in the coming days.
Source
Israel’s security cabinet is expected to meet Saturday night to declare a cease-fire in Gaza and will keep its forces there in the short term while the next stage of an agreement with Egypt is worked out.
“It looks as if all the pieces of the puzzle are coming together,” Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Friday. “There will be discussions tomorrow morning, and it looks like a cabinet meeting will take place tomorrow night. Everyone is very upbeat.”
The most promising element for bringing the three-week conflict to a close occurred in Washington on Friday, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel signed an understanding on a range of steps the United States would take to stem the flow of new arms to Hamas from the Egyptian Sinai, mostly via tunnels.
The agreement came on the last business day of the Bush administration and set the stage for the Obama administration to play a more active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. President-elect Barack Obama and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton signed off on the plan, the State Department said.
Whether Hamas will comply with the terms of parallel talks with Egypt was unclear. At a meeting organized by Qatar, a top exiled Hamas leader rejected Israeli terms for a cease-fire and called for increased resistance.
“Israel will not be able to destroy our resistance, and the United States will not be able to dictate us their rules,” the leader, Khaled Meshal, said in defiant remarks broadcast worldwide. “Arab countries should help Hamas to fight against the death of civilian Palestinians.”
But the Gaza branch of Hamas, squabbling with exiles out of the line of Israeli fire, seems to have agreed to much of Egypt’s cease-fire proposal.
Fighting in Gaza continued Friday, despite the apparent progress toward ending it. Palestinian medical officials said the death toll had risen above 1,100 people, many of them civilians.
The cease-fire under discussion is more formal than the one that broke down late last month, when each side accused the other of failing to live up to its terms, and in some ways seems devised to overcome the last one’s weaknesses.
Unlike the last one, this will be written down, in Israel’s case, in the form of an agreement with Egypt and the understanding with the United States. Israel and Hamas do not speak officially but Egypt has been brokering terms between the two. Israel was unwilling to have an accord that might confer legitimacy on Hamas, which preaches Israel’s destruction.
The agreement hammered out in Washington would provide American technical assistance, as well as international monitors, to crack down on the tunnels. It would not, however, involve the deployment of American troops in the region. The composition of the monitoring force was not yet clear, a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The agreement stipulates that the United States would work to interdict weapons with its NATO partners, expanding significantly the responsibility to keep Hamas disarmed.
After meeting with Ms. Rice, Ms. Livni, who has been hawkish on continuing the assault aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from coming into Israel, stressed that the nation had met its war aims and was prepared to enter a cease-fire cautiously.
“Israel embarked on the campaign in order to change the equation and restore its deterrent capacity,” she told Israel Radio. “We did that a few days ago, in my opinion. It has to be put to the test. If Hamas shoots, we’ll have to continue. And if it shoots later on, we’ll have to embark on another campaign.”
The Bush administration agreed to the deal after consulting Mrs. Clinton and Gen. James L. Jones, who will be Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. Ms. Rice discussed the terms over lunch with Mrs. Clinton on Thursday, the State Department spokesman said, and briefed Mr. Obama by phone.
“It’s safe to assume that we wouldn’t have moved forward if we hadn’t done some careful consultations, prior to signing, with the incoming folks,” the spokesman, Sean McCormack, said.
The timing of the agreement, after a last effort of American diplomacy, struck some Middle East experts as symbolic of a Bush administration that had refused to engage in the peace process until late in its term, and has left its successors with little choice but to re-engage.
“They will inherit this agreement, which is critically important and will make them more engaged in the region than Bush was,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “This is the shape of things to come.”
Ms. Rice said the agreement was only supportive of broader negotiations being carried out by Egypt, and she refused to say when a cease-fire could actually take place and when the fighting in Gaza would stop.
“We are doing everything we can to bring it to an end,” she said.
In Gaza, Palestinians tried to recover Friday from a heavy assault from Israel the day before.
A funeral for a senior Hamas official, Interior Minister Said Siam, who was killed Thursday by an Israeli attack, turned into a mass rally in Gaza City. Thousands raised their fingers into the air as a speaker called out, “Let us say goodbye to one of the lions of Hamas!” Passers-by stopped, elderly women emerged from houses, and children stood on roofs and declared, “This is in the name of God!”
Gaza hospitals were struggling. They were damaged on Thursday by Israel, which said mortars had been fired at its forces from sites near the hospitals. CARE International and other global aid groups said they had resumed distribution after being forced to stop by the intense attacks of the previous day. They condemned Israel’s actions.
In Tal Al Hawa, a neighborhood in southwestern Gaza City where fighting was fiercest on Thursday, Israeli tanks withdrew, leaving a blighted landscape and several dozen more dead.
Palestinians reported that a mother and her five children - 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12 years old - had been killed in the Bureij refugee camp. Three riders on motorbikes, means of transport increasingly used by Hamas fighters, were also killed by missiles.
Israel stepped up military activity on Friday evening. Palestinian medical officials reported that at least 10 Palestinians had been killed in the Shajaiye section of Gaza City by a shell that hit a house of mourning. Four more people were killed in an attack on a house in Jabaliya, north of the city.
At the meeting in Qatar, the Hamas leader, Mr. Meshal, was joined by Iran and Syria in calls for all Muslim countries to break ties with Israel. Qatar and Mauritania, which have low-level ties with Israel, were reported to have said at the meeting that they were freezing those relations.
It was not clear what impact Mr. Meshal’s fiery speech would have on any cease-fire. But his presence before the emergency meeting underscored the continued evolution of power in the region away from state players aligned with the West, to non-state players, like Hamas, and their anti-Western benefactors who support a more direct and aggressive stance toward Israel.
The once dominant regional leadership of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Jordan tried to undermine this meeting, refusing to attend, and pressed other Arab states to stay away, too.
But it was those who boycotted the event who found themselves marginalized - at least for the day - as Mr. Meshal spoke before an audience that included representatives from Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Iran and about 10 other countries assembled for the meeting in Doha, Qatar’s capital.
A senior Egyptian official said that Hamas was unhappy with Israel’s plan to leave its forces in Gaza during a short cease-fire, but that it had accepted the idea of placing the Palestinian Authority in charge of the border crossing into Egypt and the presence of European monitors there. It was unclear how the divisions within Hamas as well as within the Arab world would affect negotiations in the coming days.
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