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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel announced late Saturday night that
the Israeli military would begin a unilateral cease-fire in Gaza within hours
while negotiations continued on how to stop the resupply of Hamas through
smuggling from Egypt.
Mr. Olmert, who said all Israeli objectives for the war had been
reached, said Israel was responding positively to a call by President Hosni
Mubarak of Egypt earlier in the day for an immediate cease-fire, in a clearly
orchestrated move by two countries that both see the Hamas movement in Gaza as
a threat. Meanwhile, Hamas leaders outside Gaza have insisted that the group
will fight on, regardless of any Israeli declaration.
The announcement came on a day in which Israel was again criticized by
the United Nations over civilian deaths in Gaza — this time after a tank fired
at a United Nations school, killing two young brothers taking shelter there.
United Nations aid officials raised questions about whether the attack,
and others like it, should be investigated as war crimes. The Israeli Army said
that it was investigating the reports at the highest level but that initial
inquiries indicated that troops were returning fire from near or within the
school.
The Israeli cease-fire, which becomes effective at 2 a.m. Sunday, could
mean an effective end to a three-week-old war that has killed at least 1,200
Palestinians, with more buried under rubble, and 13 Israelis. But even then,
the shape of any lasting peace was far from clear.
Israel has signaled that its troops will stay in Gaza until a formal
truce is signed that meets Israeli goals of stopping rocket fire from Gaza and
sharply hindering the smuggling of arms, weapons, cash and fighters into Gaza
through tunnels from Egypt. But the government says it will not sign any deal
with Hamas, which is committed to Israel’s destruction and whose rule over Gaza
Israel does not want to recognize.
Also, Israeli officials said that they reserved the right to attack
again in the future if Hamas kept firing rockets into Israel. Hamas, battered
but hardly broken, is expected to reassert its political control over Gaza and
to resist any attempt to restore a presence for Fatah, the rival faction that
runs the Palestinian Authority, within Gaza.
The announcement of the unilateral cease-fire came on the 22nd day of
the war, after repeated calls by the United Nations Security Council and
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for an immediate halt to the fighting and the
deaths of civilians.
The military said that it struck hundreds of targets overnight,
including rocket-launching sites, weapons caches and 70 smuggling tunnels, and
that its troops tightened the encirclement of Gaza City.
Though exiled Hamas figures vowed to keep fighting, it was unclear how
the cease-fire will be received by leaders within Gaza. The group’s
representatives were scheduled to meet Egyptian officials in Cairo who are
trying to pull together a sustainable truce of at least a year that will end
rocket fire into Israel, hinder Hamas resupply and reopen all the crossings
into encircled Gaza from both Israel and Egypt.
Particularly concerned about limiting smuggling, the United States and
Israel signed a “memorandum of understanding” on Friday in Washington that
calls for expanded cooperation to prevent Hamas from rearming through Egypt.
The agreement, which is vague, promises increased American technical assistance
and international monitors, presumably to be based in Egypt, to crack down on
the smuggling.
As important, the United States agreed to work with NATO partners to
interdict arms smuggling into Gaza by land and sea from Syria and Iran, and in
a letter, Britain, France and Germany also offered to help interdict the
smuggling of arms to Hamas.
On Saturday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced a summit
meeting about Gaza for Sunday, of which Mr. Mubarak would be co-chairman. Mr.
Sarkozy announced that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister
Gordon Brown of Britain would attend; Mr. Brown said later he was “considering”
attending. Egypt has invited Italy, Spain, Turkey, Mr. Ban and Mahmoud Abbas,
the Palestinian president, whose Fatah party governs the West Bank. The
meeting, to take place in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik, is about
bringing a halt to the fighting in a sustainable way and reconstruction aid for
Gaza.
While Mr. Sarkozy initiated the process with Mr. Mubarak in the waning
days of the Bush administration, it has been in the end a deal shaped by Egypt
and Israel.
Mr. Mubarak’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said that his country
would not be bound by the memorandum of understanding agreed to by the United
States and Israel and would not accept foreign troops on its soil. But
officials of both Israel and the United States say Egypt has been showing a new
seriousness about stopping the smuggling.
The Arab and Muslim world again appeared to be split into two camps.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been openly critical of Hamas, pressing it to agree
to a cease-fire. Qatar, meanwhile, which is close to Iran, held a meeting with
Syria, Iran, Mauritania and Hamas’s exiled political leader, Khaled Meshal, as
the Palestinian representative. Mr. Abbas, who is supported by the United
States and Egypt, had refused to go to Qatar.
While the details are debated and the dead are counted, a critical
long-term issue is whether the Gaza operation restores Israel’s deterrent.
Israel wants Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Arab world to view it as a nation
too strong and powerful to seriously threaten or attack. That motivation is one
reason, Israeli officials say privately, for going into Gaza so hard, using
such firepower, and fighting Hamas as an enemy army.
The answer won’t be known for many months, but the key to the Muslim
world’s reaction is actually that of the Israeli public, said Yossi Klein
Halevi, of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem. “The Arabs
take their cue from Israeli responses,” he said. “Deterrence is about how
Israelis feel, whether they feel they’ve won or lost.”
Even more important, perhaps, this Gazan war is a test case for any
potential Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank. If Israelis feel that
the West Bank will turn into another kind of chaotic, Hamas-run Gaza, they will
be unwilling to withdraw — especially if they believe that once they withdrew,
and if they were attacked from the West Bank, they would not be allowed to
respond with force.
The Israeli public has stayed united behind the war as a necessary
battle, despite serious misgivings about the death toll of Palestinian
civilians and international condemnation. Even Meretz, a party on the left of
Israeli politics, supported the air war.
Hamas has modeled itself on Hezbollah, calling on Iranian support. Mr.
Nasrallah once spoke of Israeli power as a spider web — impressive from afar,
but easily brushed aside.
The question now being asked is: is this and the killing of all other
innocent civilians in Gaza a war crime?
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