Gaza’s Hamas rulers said they were ready for a fresh bid to rein in cross-border fighting with Israel, after medics said three Palestinians were killed in air raids on Saturday.
Hamas and “the Palestinian resistance factions will respect the truce as long as the [forces] of the occupation do the same, and that’s what we told our Egyptian brothers who demanded that we cease fire,” Hamas leader Ayman Taha said.
“The Egyptians have demanded that the [forces] of the occupation stop their aggression and have informed us that they are prepared to do so,” he added. “We told them that we shall respond to calm with calm; if the occupier stops [its attacks], there will be no further retaliation by the resistance factions.”
Photo: EPA
An official close to the Islamist movement said a new Egyptian-brokered truce would take effect from midnight.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment, but local media said neither side wanted an escalation, with Russian President Vladimir Putin due to start a rare visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories today.
At a Saturday night meeting of the Revolutionary Council of his Fatah party Ramallah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned “Israeli aggression” against Gaza and called for “a permanent return to calm.”
Hamas earlier threatened to call off a previous truce attempt announced on Wednesday that was unraveling, with Palestinian officials reporting three Palestinians killed and dozens wounded in seven Israeli air strikes on Saturday.
Shortly after Taha’s announcement, Palestinians fired another five rockets towards the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, but all were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, the military said.
An army spokeswoman said that by Saturday evening, 24 rockets had slammed into southern Israel from Gaza during the day, with 10 brought down by Iron Dome. Others were reported to have fallen into the sea or inside the Gaza Strip itself.
A man in the town of Sderot was injured in one attack, Israeli police said.
The current round of Israeli attacks and Palestinian retaliation began with air strikes on Monday morning, just hours after gunmen from Sinai carried out an ambush along Israel’s southern border with Egypt, killing an Israeli civilian.
Israel has said its sudden spike in Gaza operations was “in no way related” to the Sinai border incident, with the military saying the air force was targeting militants poised to attack the Jewish state.
Palestinians have reported 15 dead in Gaza strikes since Monday, with dozens wounded. At least 150 rockets and mortar shells have hit Israel, wounding five people, among them four border police officers.
Among Saturday’s fatalities, Palestinian officials said, was six-year-old Ali al-Shawaf, whose father and another man were wounded in the same strike, east of Khan Yunis. The Israeli military denied it was responsible.
“The explosion that caused the death of the Palestinian child today was because of ordnance belonging to one of the terror groups,” Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich, the army’s foreign press spokeswoman, said on Twitter.
Also killed was Ussama Ali, 42, who medics said had been on his way to a wedding in a residential district of Gaza City when he was killed by a missile apparently aimed at a passing motorcyclist.
The rider was injured and taken to the city’s Shifa hospital.
The Israeli military said that its air force carried out an attack in the northern part of the strip, where Gaza City is located, but it did not give the precise location.
The air force “targeted a terrorist squad ... during final preparations to fire a rocket at Israel,” it said in a statement. “A hit was confirmed.”
Earlier in the day, Palestinian medics said, an Israeli drone killed a Palestinian man, Khaled al-Burai, 25, east of Jabaliya, in northern Gaza.
Witnesses said Israeli aircraft carried out at least four other strikes elsewhere in Gaza on Saturday. One targeted militants traveling in a car in the Zeitoun neighborhood east of Gaza City after they had fired rockets into Israel, they said.
Raids also struck the Beit Lahiya area in the north and the Nusseirat and Al-Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza, without causing casualties, witnesses said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the