Hamas' Gaza rulers on Tuesday said they had reached a long-awaited ceasefire with Israel meant to end months of Palestinian assaults on Israeli border towns and bruising Israeli retaliation.
The announcement came shortly after Egypt, which has been trying to broker the truce for months, said the ceasefire would go into effect tomorrow. Israel refused to confirm a deal, but said a “new reality” would take hold if Palestinian attacks end.
In a last-minute jolt, Israeli aircraft attacked three targets in the southern Gaza Strip. One of the airstrikes destroyed a car, killing the five militants inside. A large crowd gathered around the car’s smoldering remains, and a puddle of blood was visible on the asphalt.
Hamas officials accused Israel of trying to undermine the truce, but said they would not let the violence derail the Egyptian efforts.
“We are going to commit ourselves to the start time that Egypt is going to declare regarding the calm,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said. However, the group’s television station said the movement would respond to “any Zionist aggression,” underscoring the delicate situation.
Egypt’s powerful intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, has been meeting separately with Israeli and Hamas officials for months in hopes of brokering a truce.
The state-run Egyptian news agency MENA cited an unidentified high-level Egyptian official as saying both sides “have agreed on the first phase” of a package to end the violence in Gaza.
It said the first phase would be a “mutual and simultaneous calm” in the Gaza Strip beginning at 6am tomorrow.
Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96. The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she lived. Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who cofounded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice. “The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
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