Israeli forces battled Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip’s main city early yesterday and bombed the enclave’s southern border with Egypt as the death toll from the war on Hamas neared 1,000.
With the war now in its 19th day, witnesses said there were far fewer air strikes on Gaza City and other parts of the north than on the previous night, but that heavy fighting still continued.
“Tanks are shelling Palestinian fighters, who are responding with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades],” an AFP correspondent said. “There is heavy machine-gun fire on both sides.”
Israeli special forces backed by tanks and air strikes had thrust ever deeper into Gaza’s City, advancing hundreds of meters into several neighborhoods in the south, witnesses said.
Palestinian medical sources said around 70 people were killed on Tuesday, taking the overall toll to around 975 Palestinians, with another 4,400 wounded.
Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or by rocket attacks since Dec. 27, when the Jewish state began its deadliest ever offensive on Gaza, ruled by the Islamist Hamas movement since mid-2007.
A Hamas delegation is currently in Cairo for talks on a Western-backed proposal drawn up by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to end the fighting.
A senior source in Cairo indicated Egypt was getting increasingly frustrated at Hamas’ response so far to its initiative, saying “they need to say ‘yes’, now, to our plan.”
Hillary Clinton, due to become US secretary of state in a week’s time, said US president-elect Barack Obama’s administration would make “every effort” to forge peace but ruled out talks with Hamas until it recognized Israel’s right to exist.
“You cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements,” she told a Senate confirmation hearing. “That is just for me an absolute.”
The UN secretary-general yesterday called for an immediate halt to the fighting in Gaza and said intense negotiations were needed as he began a weeklong trip to the region to end the crisis.
One possible solution to the crisis involves the use of Turkish troops as monitors, according to diplomats familiar with negotiations.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese government yesterday denounced the firing of three rockets from Lebanon into Israel, saying the incident undermined national unity and gave Israel an excuse to attack the country.
“Whoever is behind this attack is targeting the national consensus and all parties represented within the government,” Lebanese Information Minister Tarek Mitri said.
The incident is the second of its kind in a week. On Jan. 8, three rockets slammed into northern Israel from inside Lebanon, lightly wounding two Israelis in an attack in which the Hezbollah Shiite militia denied involvement.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has issued a 22-minute audio statement calling for jihad, or holy war, to stop Israeli “aggression” in Gaza, the US-based IntelCenter monitoring service reported yesterday.
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have declared they survived recall votes to remove them from office today, although official results are still pending as the vote counting continues. Although final tallies from the Central Election Commission (CEC) are still pending, preliminary results indicate that the recall campaigns against all seven KMT lawmakers have fallen short. As of 6:10 pm, Taichung Legislators Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) and Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔), Hsinchu County Legislator Lin Szu-ming (林思銘), Nantou County Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and New Taipei City Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) had all announced they
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday visited Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as the chipmaker prepares for volume production of Nvidia’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chips. It was Huang’s third trip to Taiwan this year, indicating that Nvidia’s supply chain is deeply connected to Taiwan. Its partners also include packager Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) and server makers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達). “My main purpose is to visit TSMC,” Huang said yesterday. “As you know, we have next-generation architecture called Rubin. Rubin is very advanced. We have now taped out six brand new
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
RSS