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Hamas and Israel Agree to Extended Gaza Cease-Fire Cease-Fire Extended, but Not on Hamas’s Terms
(about 9 hours later)
GAZA CITY — Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday reached a long-term cease-fire after seven weeks of fighting, according to officials on both sides, halting the longest, bloodiest battle either side has experienced in years — but without resolving many of the bigger issues underlying the conflict. JERUSALEM — After 50 days of fighting that took some 2,200 lives, leveled large areas of the Gaza Strip and paralyzed Israel’s south for the summer, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire agreement on Tuesday that promised only limited change to conditions in Gaza and left unresolved the broader issues underpinning the conflict.
“Israel has once again accepted an Egyptian proposal for a complete cease-fire,” a senior Israeli official said on the condition of anonymity. “This cease-fire is unlimited in time.” Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, declared victory even though it had abandoned most of its demands, ultimately accepting an Egyptian-brokered deal that differs little from one proffered on the battle’s seventh day. In effect, the deal put both sides back where they were at the end of eight days of fighting in 2012, with terms that called for easing but not lifting Israeli restrictions on travel, trade and fishing in Gaza.
Shouts of “God is great” rang out from mosque loudspeakers across Gaza City, as people fired gunshots into the air to celebrate. In Israel, continual barrages of rocket fire and fears about starting school on Monday without a cease-fire had increased pressure on the government from citizens exhausted by what had become a war of attrition. Yuval Steinitz, a senior Israeli minister, said in a television interview Tuesday night that he accepted the cease-fire “with a sour taste of missed opportunity.”
“We declare the victory of the Palestinian resistance, the victory of Gaza,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the militant Hamas movement that dominates Gaza and led the Palestinian militants’ operation, announced at a news conference at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “We achieved some of our instantaneous demands out of this battle.” “We did not want this violence, and we did not want this war,” Mr. Steinitz said. “This is a reasonable arrangement.”
The agreement came on the 50th day of a conflict that has killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and destroyed thousands of homes and other buildings across Gaza, displacing at least a third of its 1.7 million residents. On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers and five civilians were killed – the last one even as the cease-fire was being announced, as mortar rounds from Gaza struck near a swimming pool on a kibbutz just beyond its border. In Gaza City, “God is great” blared from mosque loudspeakers, and celebratory gunshots exploded in the air as hundreds waved the green flags of Hamas, while displaced residents raced on mattress-laden tuk-tuks and donkey carts back to damaged or destroyed homes in border areas.
People familiar with the agreement said it would ease but not lift Israeli restrictions on travel and trade, largely reviving the terms of a 2012 cease-fire agreement that ended an eight-day air war. It also will allow construction materials and humanitarian aid to enter Gaza in large quantities for a major rebuilding effort, with a monitoring mechanism to ensure that concrete and cement would go only to civilian purposes. “We declare the victory of the Palestinian resistance, the victory of Gaza,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, announced at Al Shifa Hospital. “We achieved some of our instantaneous demands out of this battle. We become closer to Jerusalem and our Palestinian lands.”
“We’re not interested in allowing Hamas to rebuild its military machine,” the senior Israeli official said. A statement from Egypt’s Foreign Ministry describing the deal included only vague language about “the aspirations of the Palestinian people” and the need to create “an independent Palestinian state to achieve peace and security in the region.” Hamas’s call for a seaport and airport in Gaza, and Israel’s call for demilitarization of the coastal territory — along with an exchange of Israeli soldiers’ remains for Palestinians in Israeli prisons — were put off for discussion within a month if the truce holds.
Other issues — including Hamas’s demand for a Gaza seaport and airport, Israel’s demand for Gaza’s demilitarization, and the return of Israeli soldiers’ remains believed to be in Hamas’s hands — were to be addressed after a month if the truce holds, people familiar with the agreement said. “We are all aware that this is an opportunity, not a certainty,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. He described “certain bedrock outcomes” as essential to a long-term solution, saying that Israel needed to live “without terrorist attacks, without rockets, without tunnels, without sirens going off and families scrambling to bomb shelters,” and that Palestinians required “full economic and social opportunities to build better lives for themselves and for their children.”
Drafts of a document outlining cease-fire terms had been passed back and forth throughout the day on Tuesday, even as Israeli airstrikes killed at least half a dozen people in Gaza and felled two high-rise buildings. More than 100 rockets from Gaza also rained down on Israel’s battered south, continuing even beyond the 7 p.m. deadline that some officials said marked the onset of the cease-fire. The mortar that killed the Israeli around 6:30 p.m. wounded six others, two of them seriously, according to a spokesman for the Israeli police. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations welcomed the cease-fire but said in a statement, “The blockade of Gaza must end; Israel’s legitimate security concerns must be addressed.” He warned, “Any peace effort that does not tackle the root causes of the crisis will do little more than set the stage for the next cycle of violence.”
In Ashkelon, the Israeli city less than 10 miles from Gaza, a long-range rocket destroyed one home, damaged dozens of others and sent 20 injured people to the hospital, the most in a single strike this summer. The rocket smashed through the red-tile roof of the home where Yuval and Ofra Cohen had lived for 10 years with their children, now 14 and 17, according to the Israeli police and Ynet, an Israeli news site. The agreement followed a week of renewed fighting after the collapse of an earlier cease-fire. Israel killed several top Hamas military commanders and felled three high-rise buildings in audacious airstrikes, while more than 100 rockets a day pounded its battered south.
“We hadn’t managed to make it into the safe room when it fell in our bedroom,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview on Army Radio. “It caught us in the children’s room, all the shrapnel and the dust and all of the glass. I don’t know how we escaped without harm, it’s a miracle.” More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed since the operation began July 8. Most of them were civilians, including two young siblings struck in their car in the southern city of Khan Younis moments before the cease-fire took effect at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers and six civilians were killed, including two men felled by a mortar round that exploded near a swimming pool in a kibbutz just outside Gaza around 6 p.m., the military said.
In Gaza, the Health Ministry said two people were killed in an afternoon airstrike in east Gaza City. Two others died in a drone attack in the territory’s north, and two more were killed in an airstrike at dawn, the ministry said. Voice of Palestine radio said that more than 20 homes had been destroyed overnight. “The human catastrophe is just very immense, it’s getting worse and worse every day, and I think that’s one of the reasons Hamas took into consideration in accepting the cease-fire,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “The mood is very critical of Israel, but they are also asking questions of Hamas: Why did we have to go through all this? Why is there no cease-fire? Why did we provoke Israel into this war? More and more questions are in the minds of the Palestinians, especially in this last week.”
Israel’s felling of two Gaza City towers took place in the early hours on Tuesday, after having destroyed an 11-story Gaza City apartment tower on Saturday. In Israel, support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance dropped by more than half this weekend from a high of more than eight in 10 Israeli Jews in the battle’s early days, according to polls conducted for Channel 2 News. Israel’s central bank cut interest rates on Monday to their lowest level ever to counter economic fallout, and Mr. Netanyahu has lashed out in recent days against senior ministers critical of the campaign, which commentators and politicians have increasingly argued was ill conceived.
The high-rise destroyed on Tuesday, known as the Italian Compound, had 13 floors, with four apartments on each floor. It rose above an 80,000-square-foot mall with seven shisha cafes surrounding a garden and shops selling shoes, pharmaceuticals and mobile-phone accessories, as well as the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Public Works. It was one of Gaza’s finest residential buildings, with 24-hour guards, and generators and wells to keep the elevator running and taps flowing when electricity and water ran short. “At this point, a cease-fire to me only means that I need to prepare the city for the next round,” Mayor Itamar Shimoni of Ashkelon, a city of 115,000 less than 10 miles from Gaza, said in a radio interview. “I will only believe in an agreement with Hamas if we have an international guarantee that all of the planned goals of this operation are reached.”
On Tuesday morning, the apartment line on the southeast corner and the elevator shaft were all that was left after a series of Israeli airstrikes that started after midnight, injuring about a dozen residents and leaving 40 families homeless. Israel achieved its original stated goal, to restore quiet, but Hamas’s repeated penetration of Israeli territory through tunnels, the deaths of the most Israeli soldiers since the 2006 Lebanon war, and the killing on Friday of 4-year-old Daniel Tregerman in a kibbutz near Gaza have scarred the country’s psyche.
“We spent the whole night in the street outside because it was dangerous to move,” said Hani Ashi, 44, who bought his 1,750-square-foot apartment on the tower’s fifth floor for $63,000 four years ago. Mr. Ashi said he had fled in shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, carrying only his family’s identity cards and a jalabiya, or cloak, which he donned when he got outside. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose stature fell throughout the conflict, promised on Tuesday a new diplomatic initiative to accompany the cease-fire. His allies said it would demand international guarantees for a clear deadline to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, bypass American-brokered peace talks, and use United Nations institutions and the International Criminal Court as leverage.
Zaki Shneino, a guard who has worked at the building for 10 years, said one of the tower’s apartments was hit earlier this summer; it was owned by Dirar Abu Sisi, an engineer whom Israel captured in Ukraine in 2011 and who has since been held in prison on charges that he designed Hamas weaponry, Mr. Shneino said. Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, several residents received calls on their mobile phones advising them to evacuate. “The vision should be very clear, very specific, and understood from A to Z,” Mr. Abbas said as he convened an evening meeting of 52 Palestinian leaders at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, “because engaging in vague negotiations is something we cannot continue to do.”
Mr. Ashi, who lived on the fifth floor with his wife and eight children, the youngest of them 10-year-old twins, said there were four drone-fired missiles, warning shots that Israel calls “knocks on the roof,” 10 to 20 minutes apart, then six or seven bombs dropped by F-16 warplanes. Though Egypt, Israel and the United States have all said a cease-fire should strengthen Mr. Abbas and give him the leading role in rebuilding Gaza, he was not mentioned in the Egyptian statement. The statement also said nothing about Gaza’s southern Rafah crossing with Egypt, whose frequent closings since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power in Egypt have been a prime Palestinian complaint.
By late morning, uniformed police officers and detectives in plain clothes prevented journalists and others from getting close to the rubble of the building, where bedcovers, cooking-gas cylinders, a computer and an 11th-grade textbook could be glimpsed among the debris. A man was loading boxes of unsold shoes into a van, while a cafe owner recovered bamboo chairs whose dark-red seat coverings had turned gray from the dust. The agreement restores the six-nautical-mile fishing zone off Gaza’s coast that Israel agreed to in 2012 but later cut back. It also says that Israeli-controlled border crossings will be opened to allow the “quick entry” of humanitarian aid and materials to reconstruct Gaza, where more than 11,000 homes and scores of schools and mosques have been reduced to rubble. A senior Israeli official said the entry of cement and concrete would be monitored to ensure it was used for civilian purposes, because “we’re not interested in allowing Hamas to rebuild its military machine.”
Residents said 40 of the tower’s 52 apartments had been occupied, many of them by doctors, merchants, engineers and other professionals. It was built by a Palestinian-Italian company, they said, and opened in 1998 or 1999. Criticism of the cease-fire came from Israel’s right and left.
“Prices here are a little bit higher than other buildings,” said Mr. Ashi, who worked as a police officer for the Palestinian Authority before it was routed by Hamas in 2007, and then for 10 months in the Hamas-controlled security service. “Because this is a distinguished place.” “I ask myself, what have we accomplished?” Danny Danon, a leader of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party who is often at odds with the prime minister, said on Army Radio. “If we would have acted much more aggressively to begin with, we would have ended this fighting with a much lower price and much preferable conditions.”
The other building hit Tuesday morning was Al Basha, a 12-story office tower over four stores, including one that sold bathroom tiles and fixtures and one showcasing Palestinian-made juice. Some people whose homes elsewhere in Gaza had been destroyed during the summer’s fighting had been staying in the building’s basement. Zehava Galon, head of the left-wing Meretz Party in Parliament, said that the cease-fire came “50 days too late” and that “its terms prove once and for all that this operation was Netanyahu’s strategic failure for embarking on this war without goals, and ending it by giving Hamas support.”
Hamas officials had taken over spaces in Al Basha in 2009 after some of their headquarters were destroyed in Israel’s winter incursion, posting paper signs saying they were information technology companies. But most had moved out after offices were rebuilt. But Israeli analysts said that since 1973, no prime minister has emerged from a war unscathed. Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert on public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, cautioned that it was too early to assess the outcome of the campaign.
A guard who gave his name only as Abu Ismail said an Arabic speaker who identified himself as representing the Israeli military had called his mobile phone twice as a warning before the strikes began about 4:20 a.m. First came three “knocks on the roof,” he said, followed by four F-16 bombs. Several Palestinian analysts said they, too, were waiting for more details. Noura Erakat, a lawyer and professor at George Mason University, called the agreement “unreliable at best,” saying it “lacks precision” about who will oversee the border crossings and reconstruction.
In Gaza City, health officials said Randa Nemer, 19, had been killed and 45 others wounded by the mass firing of gunshots skyward as many residents rushed to celebrate. But some Gazans were circumspect.
“We are happy that the war is over, but there is nothing requiring celebrations in the agreement,” said Bassam Hannouna, 24. “We will celebrate when we see the postponed demands existing on the ground.”