Israel declares 12-hour pause but rejects truce
The official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, made the comment when asked about Kerry’s earlier statement on a goodwill gesture by Netanyahu at a press conference in Cairo.
But later, Israel’s defence minister said Israel may soon broaden its ground operation in the Gaza Strip. In a statement by Moshe Yaalon’s office, he is quoted as telling troops in the field that “you need to be ready for the possibility that very soon we will instruct the military to significantly broaden the ground operation in Gaza”.
“Hamas is paying a very heavy price and will pay an even heavier price,” he said. “At the end of the operation, Hamas will have to think very hard if it is worth it to taunt us in the future.”
Kerry had been pushing for a deal between Israel and Hamas to call a seven-day humanitarian truce in the Gaza war.
The 12-hour pause came after days of shuttling by Kerry between the Egyptian capital, Jerusalem and the West Bank trying to work out a week-long truce.
Mr Kerry said a truce would provide seven days to work out further talks to address each side’s demands. He said some “terminology” on a truce’s framework still needed work.
“We don’t yet have that final framework, but none of us are stopping,” he said.
Speaking alongside the UN secretary-general and the Egyptian foreign minister, Mr Kerry insisted there was a general agreement on the “concept’ of a truce but both sides had concerns over details of carrying it out.
“Gaps have been significantly narrowed,” he said. “It can be achieved, if we work through some of the issues that are important for the parties.”
Gaza fighting continued alongside the truce efforts. Israeli airstrikes hit more than 80 sites in Gaza, while militants in the Mediterranean strip fired 50 rockets at Israel, the army said.
Among the sites hit in Gaza were 30 homes, including that of a leader of the Islamic Jihad group who was killed with his sons, Palestinian officials said.
And unrest sparked by the conflict intensified in the West Bank, where five Palestinians were killed during protests against the Israeli operation in Gaza.
Mr Kerry’s comments reflected the difficulty of reaching even a brief halt in fighting, with Israel determined to destroy Hamas’s military tunnels from Gaza and halt rocket fire.
After UN chief Ban Ki-moon raised the possibility of a far less ambitious 12-hour ceasefire, Mr Kerry said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “expressed a willingness to discuss such a possibility”.
Hamas demands the release of Palestinian prisoners in addition to an end to the seven-year-old border blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt after the group seized Gaza from the Western-backed government of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
Meanwhile, Israeli TV reports said Israel’s Security Cabinet unanimously rejected Mr Kerry’s proposal in its current form, mainly because it would mean Israel has to cut short the effort to destroy tunnels. However, Mr Kerry said he had not submitted a formal proposal for the Cabinet to vote on.
Israel considers the tunnels to be a strategic threat because Gaza militants have launched them for staging surprise attacks. Israeli troops have so far destroyed about half of the 31 underground passages discovered during the Gaza operation.
The worst round of cross-border fighting in more than five years has killed 828 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,200, according to Palestinian health officials.
Almost half of the Gaza Strip is a no-go area shelled by Israeli ground forces during almost three weeks of fighting, sending not just the living but the dead in search of a safe place to rest.
Many graveyards — along with whole neighbourhoods once home to hundreds of thousands of people — are too dangerous to approach, pushing some families to cram their dead among the more than 800 killed by the bombs into old, or occupied, graves closer to safety.
A sign outside the Martyrs’ Cemetery in northern Gaza warned that it was full, like many in the crowded coastal Strip, but that didn’t stop the funeral processions from coming.
Grave diggers said they had resorted to burying two people in the space of one, or opening up old family plots, sweeping the bones of their occupants to one side and adding a new body.
“In normal situations people will go to the other martyrs’ cemetery in the north or bury their dead in separate graves. But nothing is normal these days,” said Abu Bilal, a grave digger.
He complained that though he had buried hundreds of war victims, working with slain children still left him jarred.
“Death is tough, but I can’t act normal when I bury a child killed by an Israeli missile. The image of his, or her, innocent smile doesn’t leave my memory so easily,” the father of five said.
Gaza medics say more than 800 Palestinians, most of them civilians including more than 100 children, have been killed. Israel says it takes pains to avoid civilian casualties and has warned residents in border areas to flee a ground thrust aimed at destroying militants’ cross-border attack tunnels.
Israel has lost 33 soldiers in the fighting and three civilians.
Though gatherings attract the attention of the omnipresent Israeli drones which consider open spaces potential rocket launch sites, Ali Hassan and a small group of mourners arrived anyway.
The young man being buried was killed in an Israeli air strike on his family home in central Gaza on Wednesday. The surviving occupants of the house fled, leaving rescue crews working for two days to pull his remains out of the rubble.
“Not only has Israel displaced the living and forced them to seek shelter, our dead cannot be buried in separate graves. They have to be sheltered with corpses of relatives,” Hassan said.
More than 150,000 people have fled to UN refuges, including a school that was shelled on Thursday. Countless others have moved in with relatives.
Islamic precepts mandate single graves for the dead, though there are exceptions for wartime and incidents of mass death.
But where religion forgives, the Israeli-Egyptian blockade grinding Gaza’s economy does not: Cement needed to cover the graves is in short supply, sending the price of a simple burial up by a quarter to around €120 for the increasingly impoverished residents.
“We have no time to rest, dead or alive,” said Hassan glumly as he shook hands with well-wishers.
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