Israel declared ‘terrorist state’
Bolivia renounced a visa exemption agreement with Israel yesterday in protest over its offensive in Gaza, and declared it a terrorist state.
The treaty has allowed Israelis to travel freely to Bolivia since 1972. President Evo Morales said the Gaza offensive showed “that Israel is not a guarantor of the principles of respect for life... that govern the peaceful and harmonious co-existence of our international community”.
GAZA/JERUSALEM: Israel killed at least 19 Palestinians sheltering in a school in Gaza’s biggest refugee camp yesterday, a UN official said, as Egyptian mediators prepared a revised proposal to try to halt more than three weeks of fighting.
Some 3 000 Palestinians, including many women and children, were taking refuge in the building in Jebalya refugee camp when it came under fire around dawn, Khalil al-Halabi, director of northern Gaza operations for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said.
“There were five shells – Israeli tank shells – which struck the people and killed many of them as they slept. Those people came to the school because it is a designated UN shelter,” he said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said militants had fired mortar bombs from the vicin- ity of the school and troops fired back in response.
The incident was still being reviewed.
UNRWA said on Tuesday it had found a cache of rockets concealed at another Gaza school – the third such discovery since the conflict began.
It condemned unnamed groups for putting civilians at risk.
In addition to the 19 dead, some 125 people were wounded at the Jabalya school, including five in critical condition.
Blood spattered floors and mattresses inside classrooms, and some survivors picked through shattered glass and debris for flesh and body parts to bury.
Israel has been shelling in Jebalya, where some 120 000 people live, since Tuesday, in what the chief Israeli military spokesman, Brigadier-General Motti Almoz, described as a slight broadening of its campaign against militants in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israeli tank fire also struck the main market in Jebalya yesterday, killing at least three people and wounding 40 others, the Gaza Health Ministry said.
Seven members of one family died in an Israeli attack in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip.
The ministry said 1 270 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since Israel began its offensive on July 8.
On the Israeli side, 53 soldiers and three civilians have been killed.
Mohammed Deif, the shadowy leader of Hamas’s armed wing, said in a broadcast message on Tuesday that Palestinians would continue confronting Israel until its blockade on Gaza – which is supported by neighbouring Egypt – was lifted.
Five rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel yesterday, landing harmlessly in open areas, police said.
Israel has refused to unclog Gaza’s borders under any deescalation deal unless Hamas’s disarmament is guaranteed.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to review progress with his security cabinet later yesterday and a Palestinian delegation was expected in Cairo for discussions on an elusive truce.
Egypt said on Tuesday it was revising an unconditional ceasefire proposal that Israel had originally accepted but Hamas rejected, and that a new offer would be presented to the Palestinian representatives today.
AS EFFORTS founder to forge even a temporary truce in Gaza, the Obama administration is indignantly protesting that its diplomacy has been unfairly maligned by critics, especially in Israel. Secretary of State John F Kerry, officials say, has merely been trying to stop the bloodshed on the basis of previous cease-fire agreements, including an Egyptian plan that Israel accepted just two weeks ago.
The US account is mostly correct, and even some Israeli officials have acknowledged that the bitter and sometimes personal criticism of Kerry in Jerusalem went too far. Yet there is a good reason why Israelis across the political spectrum, as well as the Egyptian government and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, reacted badly to Kerry’s efforts. US strategy has failed to take into account how the fighting in Gaza during the past two weeks, as well as the Middle East’s shifting political alignments, have changed how its closest allies view the conflict’s endgame.
The big revelation of this Gaza fight has been the degree to which Hamas has invested in stockpiling missiles capable of striking Israeli cities and constructing cross-border tunnels whose only purpose is to carry out offensive attacks inside Israel. Israel is insisting, reasonably, that its troops remain in Gaza at least long enough to destroy the tunnels. It is also making the obvious point that a solution to the conflict must prevent Hamas from focusing Gaza’s economy on the production of more missiles and tunnels. Kerry’s proposal did not directly tackle that problem.
Israel is demanding that Hamas be disarmed as a part of any peace. While the Obama administration rhetorically endorsed that goal, it doesn’t seem to regard it as feasible in the short term. The objective should be explored more seriously. It might be possible, for example, to make Hamas’s surrendering of its missiles the condition for steps that would enable Gaza’s economic development, such as the opening of a seaport – a trade-off that most Gazans would welcome.
At a minimum, new security provisions should aim at preventing Hamas from importing more military supplies.