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Israeli Leader Signals No Quick End to Gaza War


Mangalore Today News Network

Jerusalem, July 29, 2014:  Israel’s prime minister Monday signaled no quick end to the three-week-old Gaza war, telling Israelis that they must prepare themselves for a prolonged conflict in order to crush what he described as the double threat of rockets and "death tunnels" into Israel dug by Hamas and its associates.


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The speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a televised address came after an informal lull by both sides in deference to a Muslim holiday was shattered by explosions that hit a children’s play area in a Palestinian refugee camp near Gaza City and killed at least 10, explosions near Gaza’s main hospital, a mortar attack that killed up to four Israelis on Israel’s side of the border, and what Israel called an attempted infiltration by Gaza gunmen through one of the tunnels.

There was no indication that either Israel or Hamas, the main militant group in Gaza, were prepared to embrace growing calls for an immediate halt to the conflict.

"Israeli citizens cannot live with the threat from rockets and from death tunnels - death from above and from below," Netanyahu said in his televised remarks. He said Israelis would not "end this operation without neutralizing the tunnels, whose sole purpose is killing our citizens."

More than 1,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and at least 43 Israeli soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side have been killed in the conflict. Efforts by the U.N. Security Council and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to achieve even a temporary halt in the fighting have proved ineffective so far.

Netanyahu did not announce an immediate broadening of the ground invasion in Gaza or any change in its stated goals of destroying Hamas’ rocket and tunnel infrastructure. But he suggested that the military campaign required "perseverance and determination," and said that the demilitarization of Gaza had to be "part of any solution, and the international community must demand that."

His defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, spoke of a campaign that could last "more long days."

"If the terrorist organizations in Gaza think they can break Israel and its citizens," Yaalon said, "they will come to understand in the next few days that this is not the case."

Israel and Hamas accused each other of responsibility for the explosions at the Shati refugee camp and Shifa Hospital. Hamas and its affiliates said Israeli aerial attacks were responsible. The Israelis said errant Palestinian rockets that had been aimed at Israel but misfired were the cause.

Later, Israel’s military reported up to four Israelis were reported killed by mortar rounds fired from the Gaza side at an Israeli military staging area. An Israeli military spokesman confirmed that there had been a mortar attack and casualties, but could provide no further details. The Israeli military also reported an infiltration attempt via tunnel by Gaza gunmen who fired at soldiers, and that several of the gunmen were killed.

Soon afterward Hamas fired barrages of rockets deep into Israel, setting off sirens as far north as the Haifa area. The Israeli military said it had warned Palestinian civilians in several areas of the eastern and northern Gaza Strip to evacuate their homes "immediately," through phone calls and text messages, signaling further escalation.

The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that at least 10 children were killed as they played in a park in the Shati refugee camp on the western edge of Gaza City. The Palestinian agency attributed the explosions to Israeli missiles. Gaza’s Health Ministry, offering a slightly different account, said the dead included at least eight children and two adults.

But Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, denied that Israel had carried out any attacks at Shati or near the main Gaza City hospital, Shifa, saying those blasts "have absolutely nothing to do with us." The Israeli military said the explosions had been caused by militant rockets aimed at Israel that had gone astray.

The missile or rocket explosion near Shifa hit an outside wall of the compound, about 200 yards from the main entrance, and caused damage but no casualties. Plainclothes security officers barred reporters from entering the compound to get close to where the rocket or missile fell.

The fragility of the unsigned calm had been foreshadowed earlier in the day when several rockets and mortars were fired into Israel. A Palestinian man and a 4-year-old boy were reportedly killed by an Israeli airstrike and artillery fire, and an Israeli soldier was wounded in a gunfight in northern Gaza.

The informal lull, after three weeks of fighting broken only by a couple of brief humanitarian pauses, had been meant to provide a respite for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that ends the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Lerner said the army had "toned down its activities to the level where we are combating tunnels on the one hand and responding to Hamas aggression on the other."

The Palestine Liberation Organization, dominated by the mainstream Fatah faction, has also strongly criticized Kerry’s efforts, faulting his meetings Saturday in Paris with European, Qatari and Turkish officials, which took place without Egyptian or PLO representatives. The PLO also accused the participants in those meetings of trying to circumvent the roles of Egypt and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and leader of the PLO.

Underscoring the uneasy, unilateral nature of the latest lull and the lack of coordination between the sides, with each reluctant to be led by the other, Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement Monday morning: "The occupation still rejects any cease-fire related to the Eid. This is a disregard for Muslims’ feelings and their worship. The occupation will bear the responsibility for this escalation and the denial of the Muslims’ worship."

Israel’s chief military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Moti Almoz, described the situation Monday as "a lull with no restrictions. The IDF is free to attack and to respond to any fire," he told Israel Radio, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

After a rocket hit the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Monday, the military said it "retaliated toward the Beit Lahiya area," in northern Gaza, "from which the rocket was fired." Later, the military said it had hit two concealed rocket launchers and a weapons manufacturing site in the northern and central Gaza Strip. 


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