All calm in Gaza as truce holds

GAZA CITY — A semblance of normal life returned to Gaza on Monday as a 72-hour truce took hold and negotiators sat down in Cairo to seek a permanent end to hostilities.

Quiet returned to the enclave from midnight (2100 GMT on Sunday), the fruit of days of Egyptian-brokered mediation to stem violence which has killed 1,940 Palestinians and 67 on the Israeli side since July 8.

With no reports of violations on either side, shops and businesses started to reopen and people ventured onto the streets of the war-torn coastal enclave which is home to 1.8 million Palestinians.

Outside a UN-run school, a clutch of cars and donkey carts waited to take some refugees back to homes they had fled during the past month.

"We want to go back to see what happened to our house," said Hikmat Atta, 58, who piled his family into a small cart to visit the home they left in the northern town of Beit Lahiya in the first days of the war.

But with the second truce in a week still in its early stages, he was not taking any chances.

“We’re just going back for the day, at night we’ll come back here,” he told AFP.

Palestinian emergency services said that a one-month-old baby girl died on Monday of injuries sustained during the Israeli offensive, raising the overall death toll in Gaza to 1,940.

Shuttle diplomacy 

In Cairo, Egyptian intelligence mediators threw themselves back into shuttle diplomacy that unravelled after the previous 72-hour truce ended on Friday.

They spent Monday locked in talks with the Palestinian delegation and were to relay their demands to Israeli negotiators, who returned to Cairo three days after abandoning the talks.

Egypt has urged the two sides to use the new lull to reach “a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire”, after efforts to extend a similar truce last week collapsed into a firestorm of violence.

Israel insists that the security of millions of its citizens subject to constant fear from Palestinian rocket attacks be guaranteed.

Hamas, the de facto power in Gaza, has conditioned its acceptance of any permanent agreement on Israel lifting its eight-year blockade on Gaza.

“In the case of Israeli procrastination or continued aggression, Hamas is ready with other Palestinian factions to resist on the ground and politically,” its exiled leader Khaled Mishaal told AFP in Doha.

And an Israeli Cabinet minister warned that without a reasonable outcome to the talks, Israel would have to consider sending ground troops back into Gaza.

“Either there will be a reasonable resolution of the situation in Gaza, or, if the fire resumes, we will have to consider a broadening of the operation, including an expansion on the ground, overthrowing the Hamas authorities and the demilitarisation of Gaza by ourselves,” Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told army radio.

“No-one is very excited by this and there is a price for it. But I think that within a couple of days, it will be decided one way or another.”

Gaza reconstruction 

James Rawley, the top UN humanitarian official for the Palestinian territories, said Israel’s security concerns must be addressed but warned that without ending the blockade another conflict was likely.

“Not only will we see very little in the way of reconstruction, but I am afraid that the conditions are in place for us to have another round of violence,” he told AFP.

Palestinian delegates in Cairo said they would be happy for President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority to take over the reconstruction of Gaza and execute any agreement reached in Cairo.

Tel Aviv has no direct dealings with Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

Hamas had refused to extend the last 72-hour lull when it expired on Friday, and Israel accused the Islamist group of breaching the agreement in its final hours with rocket attacks.

In the gap between ceasefires, warplanes hit more than 170 targets, killing at least 19 people, while the Palestinians fired at least 136 rockets at Israel, of which 93 hit and 13 were shot down, with the rest falling short inside Gaza, the army said.

The UN says just under three quarters of those killed in Gaza were civilians. Around a third of the civilian victims were children.

Turkish aid group, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, said it would send a new flotilla of ships in a bid to break Israel’s eight-year blockade on Gaza.

Four years ago, the group sent a six-ship flotilla to Gaza which was stormed by Israeli commandos, leaving 10 Turkish nationals dead and triggering a major diplomatic crisis with Ankara.

Turkey has also promised to treat 200 wounded Palestinians from Gaza — the first four of whom arrived in Ankara on Monday.

In the West Bank, a Palestinian fighter was shot dead early Monday in an exchange of fire with Israeli troops near Nablus, witnesses and a Palestinian security source said.

The Israeli army, confirming the incident, said he was wanted in connection with a shooting incident against soldiers two weeks ago.