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New Fighting a Bid for Leverage As a Gaza Cease-Fire Expires
(about 7 hours later)
JERUSALEM — A three-day truce in Gaza between Palestinian militants and Israel ended on Friday with no progress in negotiations brokered by Egypt to even temporarily extend the lull, and the antagonists resumed fighting.
GAZA CITY — Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip resumed cross-border air assaults after a three-day cease-fire expired on Friday, but the renewed violence seemed less about meeting military goals than about jockeying for leverage in talks that had made little progress toward a more durable truce.
As the 72-hour cease-fire ended at 8 a.m., the longest pause in the month-old war, militants in Gaza fired barrages of rockets into Israel and the Israeli military responded with airstrikes, killing five people including a 10-year-old boy, according to relatives and Gaza health officials. The Israeli military said at least 45 rockets were fired into Israel over the day but caused no deaths.
Militants led by Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, sent a rocket soaring toward southern Israel exactly as the agreed-upon pause expired at 8 a.m., and fired about 50 throughout the day, wounding one soldier and one civilian and damaging a house in the border town of Sderot.
It was not immediately clear how the renewed hostilities would affect the indirect negotiations in Cairo between Israel and Hamas, the dominant militant group in Gaza, for a more durable cease-fire agreement. But it was clear that the negotiations, backed by the United States and the United Nations, had not yet satisfied Hamas, which refused to extend the temporary lull. The Israeli government said in a statement that it would “not hold negotiations under fire.”
Israel, which withdrew its ground troops earlier this week, responded quickly with airstrikes and artillery shelling that by day’s end had hit nearly 50 targets and killed five people, including three children. But Israel showed no signs of seeking to re-invade Gaza or escalate its airstrikes.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, expressing “deep disappointment” over the resumed fighting, exhorted both sides to keep negotiating. “The extension of the cease-fire is absolutely essential for talks to progress and to address the underlying issues of the crisis as soon as possible,” he said in a statement.
The cause of the fighting appeared to be Hamas’s frustration that it could not get what it considers meaningful concessions from Israel and Egypt at the talks in Cairo.
Since the fighting began on July 8, more than 1,880 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, many of them civilians, and 67 have been killed on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers. Israeli ground forces withdrew from Gaza as the 72-hour truce took effect on Tuesday, but Israel had said its aerial forces would respond to attacks.
The Egyptian foreign ministry asserted that the parties had reached agreement on “the great majority of topics” and urged an extension of the cease-fire to address “the very limited points still pending.” But Palestinian officials said the Israeli delegation had hardly addressed their demands to open border crossings, remove restrictions on trade, establish a seaport and release prisoners.
A senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate diplomacy, said the Cairo talks “were based on a premise of no violence. We only went to Cairo based on an unconditional cease-fire, and then to talk about the broader issues. They have taken away the premise,” he said of Hamas.
Palestinian and Israeli analysts alike said that after a month of death and destruction, Hamas could not stop fighting without a tangible civic achievement, and was finding it difficult to climb down from an ambitious agenda in the face of a strong Egyptian-Israeli alliance.
The Israeli delegation, which has been traveling back and forth from Egypt, returned to Israel at 7 a.m. on Friday. The Palestinian delegation remained in Cairo and held talks with the Egyptians.
The conflict on the ground between an advanced, high-tech military and a guerrilla group appeared to find an echo in diplomacy, as Egypt, Israel and the United States all pushed for President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to take a leading role in running and rehabilitating Gaza. That would be a blow to Hamas, which took control of the territory in 2007, and tricky for Mr. Abbas, whose perceived cooperation with Israel has already hurt his credibility among Palestinians.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the negotiations so far had yielded agreement on “the great majority of topics of interest to the Palestinians,” and said that differences remained only around a “few, limited points.”
Ahmed Yousef, a former Hamas leader who remains close to the movement, likened the renewed fighting to two people biting each other’s fingers to see who would surrender first.
The statement called for the parties to “immediately return to the cease-fire commitment and to use the current opportunity available to resume negotiations on the very limited points still pending in the fastest possible time.”
“This is like a game, a chess game — you have all the time to continue, to show your enemy that you stay strong,” Mr. Yousef said in an interview at a seaside hotel in Gaza City. “For three days we couldn’t have a solid answer from the Israelis, so you have to go back to fighting. Your legitimate demand is not answered, so you have to put pressure on the other side.”
But the optimistic picture portrayed by the ministry was undercut by the resumption of hostilities and the frustration of Palestinian negotiators, who accused Israel of having wasted time during the three-day lull. The Palestinian side complained that its underlying grievance — the blockade imposed on Gaza by both Israel and Egypt — had been basically ignored.
Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who specializes in Arab affairs, said, “Hamas is in a bind because they have set such a high bar with their demands.
Azzam al-Ahmad, one of the Palestinian negotiators, told reporters in Cairo that his side was ready to continue negotiating. But he also said: “We won’t stay here indefinitely.”
“But you can see today Hamas and Israel exchanged blows but on a low scale — they were not firing all that they can,” Mr. Yaari noted. “Everybody understands there may be an extension or a new cease-fire.”
Israeli analysts said that Egypt was exerting pressure on Hamas and putting it in a difficult position by not addressing many of its demands.
A senior Palestinian official briefed on the Cairo negotiations said that Israel and Egypt had essentially dismissed all talk of a seaport or restored airport in Gaza, and only agreed to ease limits on travel and imports. In exchange for these concessions, Israel and its international backers demanded the demilitarization of Gaza, something the Palestinians said would come only with the establishment of an independent state.
“Hamas does not have much to lose,” said Kobi Michael, a former head of the Palestinian desk and former deputy director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and now a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “It needs to salvage some kind of achievement or it will be seen as out of credit,” Mr. Michael said.
“As Palestinians, we don’t want escalation, but it is our right to defend ourselves,” Azzam al-Ahmed, a negotiator who is close to Mr. Abbas, said in Cairo. “We won’t stay here indefinitely,” he added, referring to the talks.
After three days of quiet, Hamas was the first to fire, lobbing rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel. Some were intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system, while others fell in open ground and a few landed short in the Gaza Strip. An Israeli civilian and a soldier were injured in one of the attacks, according to the military, and a home was damaged in Sderot, the Israeli town near the Gaza border that has often been targeted by Gaza rockets. The Israeli military also reported two launchings of rockets or mortar shells from Gaza before dawn.
Kobi Michael, former head of the Palestinian desk at Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, said the negotiations so far had proved “a very humiliating treatment of Hamas by Egypt.” The country’s new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, views Hamas as an enemy because it sprang from his main domestic rival, the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Gaza, Ibrahim Dawawsa, 10, was killed in a strike from an Israeli drone as he played in the yard of a mosque in the Sheik Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, according to his brother, Zuheir, 19.
Egypt’s role is critical not only as a broker of the talks, but because it controls Gaza’s gateway to the world, the Rafah border crossing, which has been closed much of the past year. Cairo has indicated that having Mr. Abbas’s security forces back on the border, as they were before Hamas wrested control of Gaza in 2007, would be required to get it reopened.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas, wrote in a post online on Friday morning that it did not accept an extension of the lull, adding, “We will continue negotiations.” Islamic Jihad, a militant Palestinian faction that has taken part in the fighting alongside Hamas and is represented at the talks in Cairo, took responsibility for firing rockets.
“The Egyptians don’t bother with political correctness — they are very direct,” Mr. Michael said. “The Egyptians have a long memory, and like to serve up revenge cold.”
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said in a statement: “The renewed rocket attacks by terrorists at Israel are unacceptable, intolerable and shortsighted. Hamas’s bad decision to breach the cease-fire will be pursued by the I.D.F. We will continue to strike Hamas, its infrastructure, its operatives and restore security for the State of Israel.”
Except for the weapons so central to its identity, Hamas has little to offer at the bargaining table. Renewing the rocket fire not only sent Israelis scrambling into bomb shelters on another sunny Friday. It also returned the world’s attention to the killing of nearly 1,900 Gaza residents since July 8, most of them civilians, including a 10-year-old boy felled by a drone Friday morning as he played at a mosque under construction near his home.
The Israeli government statement said that Israel had informed the Egyptians that it was ready to extend the cease-fire by another 72 hours before the rocket fire resumed. “Israel will continue to act by all means to defend its citizens, while making an effort not to harm civilians in Gaza,” it said. “Hamas, which violated the cease-fire, is responsible for the harm to Gaza’s citizens.”
The day’s exchanges, however, were much less aggressive than before the cease-fire. An afternoon airstrike hit a Gaza City home belonging to a Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, injuring three, witnesses said. A strike in Al Qarara, a village near Khan Younis, killed three cousins, ages 10, 12 and 22, who were in a crowd of people waiting outside a grocery store to fill bottles with clean water.
Just at 8 a.m., as television correspondents stood on the beachside road in Gaza City to do their live reports, the first rocket marking the end of the cease-fire was launched. The signature white plume of the Israeli interception was visible in the air for miles. A few more booms were heard in the next 15 minutes, but they hardly disrupted the trickle of donkey carts on the street.
The Israeli military reported that two rockets were fired into southern Israel even before the cease-fire expired, but the barrage began exactly at 8 a.m. for maximum public-statement effect. The rockets continued for hours, but none went beyond southern Israel, a contrast from a month in which a few sirens sounded in the Tel Aviv area most days.
People were out in the streets of Gaza City, and some stores were open, much as during the previous three days of cease-fire. Children roamed outside, men sat on sidewalks, and a line of a few dozen waited to buy bread at the Khouli bakery.
“This is not a worsening of the conflict — this is a tactical move, and we need the perspective of time to understand whether this is also a strategic move,” Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, said on Israel Radio. “Military Hamas did not absorb a strong enough blow in order to have it agree to the conditions the Egyptians and Israelis are trying to force on it.”
Farther north, in Jabaliya, where thousands of people have been sheltering in United Nations schools, the streets were teeming with people. An elderly man was walking with seven camels. Children balanced cartons of supplies on their heads, taking them from the market to the shelters.
Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, said that firing a few dozen rockets into Israel was not, “from a rational way of thinking,” likely to move Israel on core issues it considers a threat to its security. The audience for Friday’s display, he said, was really the beleaguered population of Gaza, where whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, displacing nearly a quarter of the 1.7 million residents, and virtually everyone has buried a loved one.
In areas closer to the border with Israel, like Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, the streets were almost deserted. In Beit Lahiya, half of the two dozen tall apartment buildings of the huge Al Nada complex had been destroyed by nearly a month of Israeli airstrikes, artillery and tank fire.
“Hamas is trying to send a macho message to the Palestinian people — that we bring Israel to the negotiating table and we are still launching missiles,” Mr. Abusaada said. “The problem is, Hamas is acting like a superpower. We know that Israel is the superpower, and Hamas can only annoy the Israelis, but Hamas is not in a position to put enough pressure on Israel to make concessions.”
In Beit Hanoun, now a ghost town of toppled homes and rubble-strewn streets, Anas Kaferna, 25, and his brother and sister were tying mattresses to the top of a silver sedan and heading south. “I don’t want to be the last one in town,” Mr. Kaferna said.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, called the renewed rocket fire “unacceptable, intolerable and shortsighted.” A senior Israeli government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate diplomacy, said the Palestinian militants “have taken away the premise” for the Cairo talks — “an unconditional cease-fire.”
Since their home was destroyed at the start of the ground invasion, the siblings had been sleeping at a maternity hospital where Mr. Kaferna worked as a security guard. But with the news that the cease-fire was over, they headed to Gaza City, although they did not know where.
But Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American business consultant and political commentator, said the Cairo process was inherently flawed because Israel and the Palestinians did not come to it on equal footing after 47 years of occupation.
“Now it seems the situation will get harder,” he said. “Maybe yes and maybe no. I don’t understand politics.”
“The sheer use of the word ‘cease-fire’ is insulting — it depicts an artificial symmetry,” Mr. Bahour wrote on the blog Middle East Eye, “even though reality on the ground is totally contrary.”
Hamas radio reported an Israeli airstrike in agricultural land north of Gaza City, which caused no injuries, as well as an airstrike in Jabaliya. It said artillery shells had hit the Nada complex in Beit Hanoun, as well as the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis.
Pointing to Egypt’s border restrictions on Gaza, he added: “To be conducting these ‘cease-fire’ talks in the capital of a country that participates in the siege of the Gaza Strip should be an embarrassment to every member of the Palestinian negotiating team, first among them Hamas.”
The 72-hour truce came after 29 days of fierce fighting that left more than 1,800 Palestinians dead, many of them civilians. On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers and three civilians were killed. Israel said its military campaign, which began July 8 with an aerial assault and led to a ground invasion, was aimed at quelling rocket fire and destroying Hamas’s network of tunnels leading into Israeli territory. Israel withdrew its ground troops from the Gaza Strip but left them on alert along the border and kept its air force on standby.
Hamas is demanding a lifting of the blockade on Gaza imposed by Israel and Egypt and an opening of all the border crossings to allow the free movement of people and goods in and out of the Palestinian coastal territory. Israel is demanding measures to prevent Hamas from rearming and, eventually, the demilitarization of Gaza.
A spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said in a speech aired Thursday night on Hamas’s television channel, Al Aqsa, that the Israeli forces had left in defeat.
“We gave a space for negotiations in order to agree on the demands of the Palestinian resistance and bring our people a better life of dignity,” he said, warning, “We are ready to resume the gun battle again.”
“We will not accept to end this battle without stopping the aggression, lifting the siege and the most important demand of building a seaport for Gaza, and we will never accept less than that,” he said.
