No easy answers in Gaza conflict
JERUSALEM — Israeli leaders have stressed two points in selling their Gaza Strip ground invasion internationally and at home: that they embraced all cease-fire proposals and that troops are targeting tunnels Palestinian militants use to infiltrate their territory.
With the lopsided casualty count mounting on both sides — at least 570 Gazans, 29 Israeli soldiers and two Israeli civilians — world leaders are demanding an immediate halt to the hostilities. But the operation has uncovered more tunnels than expected, officials
said, and there were two more deadly incursions Monday, making many Israelis say they were reluctant to leave a job half finished.
That has Israeli officials struggling with a more distilled version of the dilemma it has faced in repeated rounds against Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza. If it stops now, it faces the prospect of a newly embittered enemy retaining the capacity to attack. But if it stays the course, it is likely to kill many more civilians and face international condemnation.
“Israel must not agree to any proposal for a cease-fire until the tunnels are eliminated,” Gilad Erdan, the right-wing minister of communications, said during a hospital visit to wounded soldiers.
But Tzipi Livni, the centrist justice minister, told reporters that demilitarizing Gaza could be tackled after an agreement, and that “to cease the fire, stop the fire, this is the main goal right now.”
As Secretary of State John Kerry and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon landed in Cairo on Monday night to search for a cease-fire, analysts set low expectations. The Hamas-Israel feud is in many ways trickier and outside the core Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis feel they withdrew from Gaza only to allow it to become a launching pad for rockets, and Hamas refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. For each, eradicating the other is the goal — not a twostate solution.
Israel and Egypt have severely restricted movement in and out of Gaza since Hamas seized the territory in 2007.
Ismail Haniyeh, until recently the Hamas prime minister, said in a speech Monday that Gaza’s 1.7 million people share Hamas’ goal of forcing Israel and Egypt to lift the blockade.
“We cannot go back; we cannot go back to the silent death” of the blockade, he said. “Gaza has decided to end the blockade by its blood and by its courage.”
Israel seized Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war but withdrew all its settlers and soldiers in 2005 in an evacuation that still roils the society. Rightwingers use the last decade of intermittent fire from Gaza — it continued Monday, with the military’s count of rockets launched since the start of the operation topping 2,000 — as a prime argument against any further withdrawal from occupied territory.
The death toll Monday surpassed 100 for a second day. The Abu Jameh family pulled 26 bodies, 19 of them children, from the rubble of their home near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, the largest toll from a single strike since the battle began July 8.
Four people were killed when Israeli tanks shelled Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the main one serving the center of the crowded coastal enclave. Israel said the shelling targeted rockets hidden near the compound and accused militants of using civilians as shields.
An air strike Monday night destroyed the top five floors of an apartment building called Al-Salam — the Peace — in central Gaza City, an area that had been seen as a safe haven, killing 11.
Early Tuesday, Israel bombed five mosques, a sports stadium and the home of the late Hamas military chief in attacks across the Gaza Strip, a Gaza police official said.
Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defense minister, has said the forces might be able to destroy all the tunnels into Israeli territory within a few days — which may be as long as it takes to push through a cease-fire. Momentum was gathering behind an Egyptian initiative first presented a week ago, but Hamas does not trust the new government in Cairo, which defines it as an enemy.
Ban of the United Nations suggested in Cairo on Monday night that a humanitarian pause might be the best path to a more durable cease-fire.
“The violence must stop; it must stop now,” Ban said at a news conference with Egypt’s foreign minister. Afterward, “we cannot claim victory by simply returning matters to where they stood before the last terrible bloodshed.”