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Hamas: We will not accept Israel's demands for Gaza cease-fire, Special Coverage, Israelis back Gaza War
Hamas: We will not accept Israel's demands for Gaza cease-fire
By Barak Ravid
Last update - 00:46 17/01/2009
Hamas will not accept Israel's conditions for a cease-fire in Gaza and will continue armed resistance until the offensive ends, Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist group, said on Friday.
Speaking at the opening of an emergency meeting on Gaza in Doha, Meshal called on the leaders present to cut all ties with Israel.
Meshal joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a surprise appearance at the summit, aimed to show their weight in diplomatic efforts surrounding the Gaza crisis.
Hamas was to send a delegation to Cairo on Friday to discuss Egyptian efforts to mediate a cease-fire in Gaza, a Hamas official told Al-Jazeera television.
SPECIAL COVERAGE
Meshal's comments contradicted a report published in the al-Sharq al-Awset daily on Friday, which claimed Hamas was prepared to accept a conditional cease-fire with Israel starting on Saturday.
According to the report, Hamas has set five conditions for the cease-fire:
1. The reciprocal truce would begin on Saturday and be followed by the immediate transfer of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
2. The Israel Defense Forces must pull all of its troops out of the coastal territory within the first week of the truce.
3. The flow of trade in and out of the Gaza Strip must be renewed and monitored by observers from Egypt, Europe, and Turkey.
4. The Rafah crossing must be reopened and supervised by Palestinian Authority security forces and international observers, until a Palestinian unity government has been established and can take its place.
5. The truce would be instated for one year with an option for renewal.
Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad said Friday that the Arab initiative for peace with Israel is "dead" because of its offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Speaking at the summit in Qatar, Assad called on the participating Arab countries to sever "all direct and indirect" ties with Israel in protest against its continued operation in the coastal strip.
Ahmadinejad, who is also attending the meeting of Arab and Muslim leaders in Qatar, said the Gaza offensive proved that Israel was in its last throes.
Muslim nations "need to cut relations with Israel and America. Just ties. They don't need to do anything more than that," Ahmadinejad said Friday, according to an Arabic translation of his comments.
Earlier Friday, Israeli and Western sources said that Jerusalem has rebuffed some of the conditions initially set forth by Hamas for an Egyptian-proposed truce in the Gaza Strip, including how long it would last and who would manage the border crossings.
Jerusalem has expressed reservations regarding the Islamist group's terms, despite Cairo's apparent promise to crack down on arms smuggling to Gaza - one of Israel's key demands - and Hamas's willingness to accept the offer.
The Israeli and Western sources said Israel had objected to putting a
time limit on the truce. Hamas proposed a 12-month agreement that could later be extended.
"A time limit on any period of quiet is a mistake," a senior Israeli source said. "We saw that when the previous calm ran out of time, it was just an excuse for some to escalate the violence. An open-ended calm is what is needed."
Another Israeli source said that defense official Amos Gilad, who heads the Defense Ministry's diplomatic-security department, returned from his first day of talks in Egypt on Thursday with a reassuring report of progress.
Upon his return, Gilad headed straight to Jerusalem to report to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Gilad was back in Cairo on Friday for further negotiations.
The diplomatic-security cabinet was to meet Friday to vote on the offer, but decided to put off the debate until Gilad returns to Israel with an additional report.
Meanwhile, Livni headed to Washington on Friday to sign a deal of understanding with her American counterpart Condoleezza Rice on the joint supervision and treatment of weapons smuggling from Iran to the Gaza Strip.
"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorized this evening the trip of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to the United States in order to promote an American-Israeli outlined agreement intended to deal with weapons smuggling," Olmert's office said in a statement.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday that he believed a cease-fire could be signed in a few days, but this depends on Israel's leadership.
The Egyptian truce proposal, of which Haaretz obtained a copy Thursday, contains three clauses.
First, Israel and the Palestinians would agree to an immediate, time-limited cease-fire, during which the border crossings will be opened for humanitarian aid and Egypt will lead negotiations on a long-term truce.
Second, the long-term truce must include provisions on both border security and an end to the blockade of Gaza.
Third, Fatah and Hamas should resume reconciliation talks.
Egyptian officials told Haaretz they believe the initial, short-term truce should last a few months, to allow plenty of time for negotiations on the long-term cease-fire.
However, the proposal does not require Israel to withdraw from Gaza during the initial truce, and Hamas has said it will not accept the proposal unless that omission is corrected.
Salah al-Bardawil, who was Hamas's Gazan representative to the talks with Egypt, said his organization demands that Israel completely withdraw within five days of whenever the initial cease-fire takes effect.
Hamas also insists that the agreement include a deadline by which the border crossings must reopen.
Israel, for its part, insists that the crossings not be reopened until the smuggling issue is resolved to its satisfaction. It also wants Hamas to agree to an explicit timetable for concluding a deal on kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit and to be more flexible in what it is demanding in exchange for Shalit.
Related articles:
Livni to set off for Washington for talks on Gaza cease-fire
IDF kills Hamas Interior Minister Said Sayyam in Gaza airstrike
Boy, 7, seriously hurt as Gaza rockets slam into Be'er Sheva
Rice cautions Israel over IDF shelling of UN warehouse
Palestinian sources: 'Iranian unit' of Hamas has been destroyed
Livni to set off for Washington for talks on Gaza cease-fire
Despite civilian casualties, Israelis solidly back Gaza war
By Shashank Bengali
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israelis hear the outcry. They aren't blind to civilian deaths, to the destruction of homes and livelihoods or to mass suffering in the Gaza Strip.
However, Israelis support the war against Hamas by more than four to one. If you lived here, many say, you would too.
"People that have demonstrated against us all over the world, they don't live here. They don't know the reality here," said Samuel Balmas, a 41-year-old engineer, as he sipped mint tea Thursday on a placid, tree-lined boulevard in the seaside metropolis of Tel Aviv, 40 miles and a universe away from the devastation in Gaza.
Polls show that Jewish Israelis see the nearly three-week-old war as necessary and justified, despite nearly 1,100 deaths in Gaza — some 40 percent of them women and children — and massive destruction of Palestinian homes and property.
The public attitude here is that there's no peaceful way to deal with a foe such as Hamas, which doesn't recognize Israel's existence and whose fighters have fired thousands of crude rockets into southern Israeli towns over the past eight years. It extends to the country's newspapers, some of which admit that they've played down the civilian deaths among Palestinians out of bias.
In the face of worldwide criticism — apart from the United States, where the public squarely backs Israel, according to a recent McClatchy/Ipsos poll — Israelis are defiant. The independent newspaper Haaretz reported Thursday that 82 percent of Israelis surveyed said the country's military hadn't "gone too far" in its use of force in Gaza.
"They should have done this five years ago," said Oded Tadmor, a retired civil servant, studying a newspaper at a Tel Aviv cafe.
Not that he's unmoved by the deaths of Palestinian women and children, said Tadmor, who's 57. He noted, however, that Gazans had elected Hamas, a group that's known for using civilians as shields.
"I'm very glad that people make protests. They are free to do so. This is a democracy," he said. "But they (Gaza) also had a democratic election and chose Hamas. So if you ask me, everything is a legitimate target."
It's not unusual for a country to unite when it's under attack, as Americans will recall from 9/11. Israel also is a compact nation of only about 7 million people, where every household knows a soldier, and in many ways the war in Gaza feels like a national effort.
The Israeli news media, either mindful of their audience's bias or sharing it, has focused on the home front. Three Israeli civilians have been killed in rocket attacks since the war began, but even stories about rockets that caused no serious injuries routinely make the front pages and lead the evening newscasts.
"You can't compare by the number of people dying here and there," said Balmas, whose elderly father lives in southern Israel and has had rockets land within a few hundred yards of his house. "We didn't send bombs to them. They sent them to us first."
The plight of civilians in Gaza, while not ignored, usually is relegated to the back pages of newspapers. Few Israeli news organizations have Palestinian reporters in Gaza, so most rely on wire service accounts.
On Jan. 7, when news media around the world spotlighted the Israeli shelling of a U.N.-run school Jan. 6 in northern Gaza, in which about 40 people reportedly died, Israel's most popular daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, ran the story on page seven. On the front page that day was news of three Israeli soldiers who died in "friendly fire," the military's deadliest incident of the war.
"We're the same as the public; we've been biased on the Israeli side for much of the campaign," said Daniel Bettini, the paper's foreign editor, who said that some editors now regretted not giving the school attack greater prominence.
None of the major Israeli daily newspapers focused Thursday on another development that made headlines elsewhere in the world: nine Israeli human rights groups calling Wednesday for a war-crimes investigation into the Israeli military's "wanton use of lethal force" in Gaza. The groups said that Israeli forces had fired on ambulances and humanitarian vehicles and had failed to rescue civilians who were trapped in buildings.
Many Israelis think that such concerns can wait until the war is over, experts said.
"Right now everyone is concerned about one thing: ending the war in a way that southern Israel doesn't have to keep going into bomb shelters," said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a communications professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Emotions are far trickier for Israel's Arab minority, which makes up about 20 percent of the country's population. Pollsters say that most of the Israeli opposition to the war comes from the Arab community.
In Jaffa — a historic Arab port that Tel Aviv has swallowed but that still counts a sizable Arab population — residents said that the toll on Palestinians saddened them deeply.
"It makes me sick," said Malik Hamour, a 28-year-old juice vendor. "I don't like Hamas attacking Israel, and I don't like Israel attacking the Palestinian people."
Hamour is an Israeli by birth, however, and even he is playing his part in the war effort. He motioned to the back of his store, where a group of young Israeli soldiers sat sipping orange juice and milkshakes.
"Soldiers," he said, "get a discount."
(McClatchy special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this article from Jerusalem.)
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY:
Israel shells Gaza U.N. warehouse, hospital, news bureaus
Gaza war also being waged in cyberspace
Groups say Israel failed to plan for the safety of Gaza civilians
McClatchy inauguration coverage
By Barak Ravid
Last update - 00:46 17/01/2009
Hamas will not accept Israel's conditions for a cease-fire in Gaza and will continue armed resistance until the offensive ends, Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist group, said on Friday.
Speaking at the opening of an emergency meeting on Gaza in Doha, Meshal called on the leaders present to cut all ties with Israel.
Meshal joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a surprise appearance at the summit, aimed to show their weight in diplomatic efforts surrounding the Gaza crisis.
Hamas was to send a delegation to Cairo on Friday to discuss Egyptian efforts to mediate a cease-fire in Gaza, a Hamas official told Al-Jazeera television.
SPECIAL COVERAGE
Meshal's comments contradicted a report published in the al-Sharq al-Awset daily on Friday, which claimed Hamas was prepared to accept a conditional cease-fire with Israel starting on Saturday.
According to the report, Hamas has set five conditions for the cease-fire:
1. The reciprocal truce would begin on Saturday and be followed by the immediate transfer of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
2. The Israel Defense Forces must pull all of its troops out of the coastal territory within the first week of the truce.
3. The flow of trade in and out of the Gaza Strip must be renewed and monitored by observers from Egypt, Europe, and Turkey.
4. The Rafah crossing must be reopened and supervised by Palestinian Authority security forces and international observers, until a Palestinian unity government has been established and can take its place.
5. The truce would be instated for one year with an option for renewal.
Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad said Friday that the Arab initiative for peace with Israel is "dead" because of its offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Speaking at the summit in Qatar, Assad called on the participating Arab countries to sever "all direct and indirect" ties with Israel in protest against its continued operation in the coastal strip.
Ahmadinejad, who is also attending the meeting of Arab and Muslim leaders in Qatar, said the Gaza offensive proved that Israel was in its last throes.
Muslim nations "need to cut relations with Israel and America. Just ties. They don't need to do anything more than that," Ahmadinejad said Friday, according to an Arabic translation of his comments.
Earlier Friday, Israeli and Western sources said that Jerusalem has rebuffed some of the conditions initially set forth by Hamas for an Egyptian-proposed truce in the Gaza Strip, including how long it would last and who would manage the border crossings.
Jerusalem has expressed reservations regarding the Islamist group's terms, despite Cairo's apparent promise to crack down on arms smuggling to Gaza - one of Israel's key demands - and Hamas's willingness to accept the offer.
The Israeli and Western sources said Israel had objected to putting a
time limit on the truce. Hamas proposed a 12-month agreement that could later be extended.
"A time limit on any period of quiet is a mistake," a senior Israeli source said. "We saw that when the previous calm ran out of time, it was just an excuse for some to escalate the violence. An open-ended calm is what is needed."
Another Israeli source said that defense official Amos Gilad, who heads the Defense Ministry's diplomatic-security department, returned from his first day of talks in Egypt on Thursday with a reassuring report of progress.
Upon his return, Gilad headed straight to Jerusalem to report to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Gilad was back in Cairo on Friday for further negotiations.
The diplomatic-security cabinet was to meet Friday to vote on the offer, but decided to put off the debate until Gilad returns to Israel with an additional report.
Meanwhile, Livni headed to Washington on Friday to sign a deal of understanding with her American counterpart Condoleezza Rice on the joint supervision and treatment of weapons smuggling from Iran to the Gaza Strip.
"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorized this evening the trip of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to the United States in order to promote an American-Israeli outlined agreement intended to deal with weapons smuggling," Olmert's office said in a statement.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday that he believed a cease-fire could be signed in a few days, but this depends on Israel's leadership.
The Egyptian truce proposal, of which Haaretz obtained a copy Thursday, contains three clauses.
First, Israel and the Palestinians would agree to an immediate, time-limited cease-fire, during which the border crossings will be opened for humanitarian aid and Egypt will lead negotiations on a long-term truce.
Second, the long-term truce must include provisions on both border security and an end to the blockade of Gaza.
Third, Fatah and Hamas should resume reconciliation talks.
Egyptian officials told Haaretz they believe the initial, short-term truce should last a few months, to allow plenty of time for negotiations on the long-term cease-fire.
However, the proposal does not require Israel to withdraw from Gaza during the initial truce, and Hamas has said it will not accept the proposal unless that omission is corrected.
Salah al-Bardawil, who was Hamas's Gazan representative to the talks with Egypt, said his organization demands that Israel completely withdraw within five days of whenever the initial cease-fire takes effect.
Hamas also insists that the agreement include a deadline by which the border crossings must reopen.
Israel, for its part, insists that the crossings not be reopened until the smuggling issue is resolved to its satisfaction. It also wants Hamas to agree to an explicit timetable for concluding a deal on kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit and to be more flexible in what it is demanding in exchange for Shalit.
Related articles:
Livni to set off for Washington for talks on Gaza cease-fire
IDF kills Hamas Interior Minister Said Sayyam in Gaza airstrike
Boy, 7, seriously hurt as Gaza rockets slam into Be'er Sheva
Rice cautions Israel over IDF shelling of UN warehouse
Palestinian sources: 'Iranian unit' of Hamas has been destroyed
Livni to set off for Washington for talks on Gaza cease-fire
Despite civilian casualties, Israelis solidly back Gaza war
By Shashank Bengali
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israelis hear the outcry. They aren't blind to civilian deaths, to the destruction of homes and livelihoods or to mass suffering in the Gaza Strip.
However, Israelis support the war against Hamas by more than four to one. If you lived here, many say, you would too.
"People that have demonstrated against us all over the world, they don't live here. They don't know the reality here," said Samuel Balmas, a 41-year-old engineer, as he sipped mint tea Thursday on a placid, tree-lined boulevard in the seaside metropolis of Tel Aviv, 40 miles and a universe away from the devastation in Gaza.
Polls show that Jewish Israelis see the nearly three-week-old war as necessary and justified, despite nearly 1,100 deaths in Gaza — some 40 percent of them women and children — and massive destruction of Palestinian homes and property.
The public attitude here is that there's no peaceful way to deal with a foe such as Hamas, which doesn't recognize Israel's existence and whose fighters have fired thousands of crude rockets into southern Israeli towns over the past eight years. It extends to the country's newspapers, some of which admit that they've played down the civilian deaths among Palestinians out of bias.
In the face of worldwide criticism — apart from the United States, where the public squarely backs Israel, according to a recent McClatchy/Ipsos poll — Israelis are defiant. The independent newspaper Haaretz reported Thursday that 82 percent of Israelis surveyed said the country's military hadn't "gone too far" in its use of force in Gaza.
"They should have done this five years ago," said Oded Tadmor, a retired civil servant, studying a newspaper at a Tel Aviv cafe.
Not that he's unmoved by the deaths of Palestinian women and children, said Tadmor, who's 57. He noted, however, that Gazans had elected Hamas, a group that's known for using civilians as shields.
"I'm very glad that people make protests. They are free to do so. This is a democracy," he said. "But they (Gaza) also had a democratic election and chose Hamas. So if you ask me, everything is a legitimate target."
It's not unusual for a country to unite when it's under attack, as Americans will recall from 9/11. Israel also is a compact nation of only about 7 million people, where every household knows a soldier, and in many ways the war in Gaza feels like a national effort.
The Israeli news media, either mindful of their audience's bias or sharing it, has focused on the home front. Three Israeli civilians have been killed in rocket attacks since the war began, but even stories about rockets that caused no serious injuries routinely make the front pages and lead the evening newscasts.
"You can't compare by the number of people dying here and there," said Balmas, whose elderly father lives in southern Israel and has had rockets land within a few hundred yards of his house. "We didn't send bombs to them. They sent them to us first."
The plight of civilians in Gaza, while not ignored, usually is relegated to the back pages of newspapers. Few Israeli news organizations have Palestinian reporters in Gaza, so most rely on wire service accounts.
On Jan. 7, when news media around the world spotlighted the Israeli shelling of a U.N.-run school Jan. 6 in northern Gaza, in which about 40 people reportedly died, Israel's most popular daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, ran the story on page seven. On the front page that day was news of three Israeli soldiers who died in "friendly fire," the military's deadliest incident of the war.
"We're the same as the public; we've been biased on the Israeli side for much of the campaign," said Daniel Bettini, the paper's foreign editor, who said that some editors now regretted not giving the school attack greater prominence.
None of the major Israeli daily newspapers focused Thursday on another development that made headlines elsewhere in the world: nine Israeli human rights groups calling Wednesday for a war-crimes investigation into the Israeli military's "wanton use of lethal force" in Gaza. The groups said that Israeli forces had fired on ambulances and humanitarian vehicles and had failed to rescue civilians who were trapped in buildings.
Many Israelis think that such concerns can wait until the war is over, experts said.
"Right now everyone is concerned about one thing: ending the war in a way that southern Israel doesn't have to keep going into bomb shelters," said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a communications professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Emotions are far trickier for Israel's Arab minority, which makes up about 20 percent of the country's population. Pollsters say that most of the Israeli opposition to the war comes from the Arab community.
In Jaffa — a historic Arab port that Tel Aviv has swallowed but that still counts a sizable Arab population — residents said that the toll on Palestinians saddened them deeply.
"It makes me sick," said Malik Hamour, a 28-year-old juice vendor. "I don't like Hamas attacking Israel, and I don't like Israel attacking the Palestinian people."
Hamour is an Israeli by birth, however, and even he is playing his part in the war effort. He motioned to the back of his store, where a group of young Israeli soldiers sat sipping orange juice and milkshakes.
"Soldiers," he said, "get a discount."
(McClatchy special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this article from Jerusalem.)
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY:
Israel shells Gaza U.N. warehouse, hospital, news bureaus
Gaza war also being waged in cyberspace
Groups say Israel failed to plan for the safety of Gaza civilians
McClatchy inauguration coverage
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