.Bloodied Gaza set for the endgame
In the emergency room of Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Dr Raed al-Arayni was entering his 12th day of nonstop work and was preparing for yet another operation when his worst nightmare came true.
The bloodied little boy being carried into the room by a neighbour was screaming at him. “Baba, baba [daddy, daddy],” the child cried.
“I did not recognise my own child because of his injuries,” recalled Arayni. “For a few seconds I couldn’t move, my knees became weak. I could barely stand at the sight of my child halfway between life and death.”
Running over he realised that both his sons – Hathifa, 7, and Abdul Rahman, 5 – were lying in his emergency room, severely wounded.
Tears streaming down his face, Arayni began working feverishly on Hathifa, who had the worst injuries. A chunk of shrapnel had pierced his chest, his right leg was broken and blood poured from his wounds.
A colleague began treating Abdul Rahman. The nerves in his broken left arm had been severed and he had no feeling in his hand. They were able to stabilise the two boys.
“I just thank God my children didn’t arrive to me in bits and pieces, missing body parts as the women and children I see arriving daily,” said Arayni, standing by Hathifa’s bedside, his face showing the exhaustion of almost two weeks of back-to-back operations. The slight, bearded surgeon had not returned home for 12 days,grab-bing a nap or a meal at the hospital when he could.
When the Israelis launched a massive attack against Hamas, the Islamic extremist group that rules Gaza, to stop it launching rockets against Israel’s southern cities, he had moved his family from their home in Jabaliya, a crowded refugee camp just north of Gaza City. They took refuge with a relative in the more central Fakhura district, believing they would be safer.
The surgeon pushed aside the thought of his own children as the wounded poured in, sometimes so many that the operating floors were slick with blood. Injured men, women and children were piled in the corridors and surgeons commandeered the recovery room.
On Tuesday Um Mustafa, his wife, and their boys had gone up on the roof of the building, desperate for some fresh air after almost a week inside while Israeli jets screamed overhead and missiles, tank and artillery rounds pounded the coastal strip day and night.
The boys had been playing for about an hour when Um Mustafa sent them downstairs for a bottle of water. Moments later a huge explosion rocked the building, followed by a second. Two missiles had slammed into the girls’ primary school next door run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, where Gazans fleeing the fighting had been given refuge. Some 40 people, many of them women and children, were killed.
A controversy still rages over the strike on the school, one of three bombed by the Israelis within 24 hours. Israel claimed militants had fired mortars from near the school. UN officials insisted their security guards kept militants out of their compounds and that they had even given the Israeli military the GPS coordinates for their 23 schools, refuge for some 15,000 Gazans, to avert such a tragedy.
As soon as Hathifa and Abdul Rahman were stabilised, Arayni went back to operating on the casualties from the school bombing. As he left their room on Friday, leaving the boys in the care of their weeping mother, Abdul Rahman woke from a feverish sleep and began calling out for his father.
“I want my daddy. Where is he? Is he hurt?” he cried His older brother, the shrapnel still in his chest because it is too dangerous to remove, reassured him. “No, he’s treating other kids who got hurt like us,” Hathifa said.
By the standards of the past fortnight in Gaza, the Arayni boys were lucky. At the last count 830 Palestinians had been killed and some 3,000 wounded, according to health officials in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry said at least a third were children.
Israeli troops were dug in on the outskirts of Gaza City and hunkered down in Palestinian homes they had seized . Hamas’s security forces had been driven from the streets, but struck back in hit-and-run attacks from tunnels, sniped from rooftops and continued to launch rockets into Israel.
Northern Gaza was a waste-land. Whole blocks of the concrete apartment buildings and small homes of the refugee camps of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya were devastated, hit by missiles or demolished by military bulldozers.
Aid officials warned of a humanitarian disaster. The UN said two-thirds of Gazans were without electricity and half had no water. Food and medical supplies were running low.
On Wednesday Israel relented slightly, announcing it would stop firing between the hours of 1pm and 4pm to allow aid agencies to deliver supplies.
Nevertheless, it showed no sign of ending its operations any time soon. From Israel’s perspective it is fighting a crucial battle, backed by near-unanimous popular support, against an enemy committed to its ultimate destruction and which has continued to target its citizens in the south.
There was more evidence of that yesterday as at least 10 Hamas rockets were fired at Israeli targets. One hit a block of flats in the city of Ashkelon, wounding two people.
“Israel has acted, is acting and will act only according to its considerations, the security needs of its citizens and its right to self-defence,” Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and the ruling Kadima party’s candidate for prime minister, said on Friday.
How close is Israel to achieving its goals? What has the bloodshed achieved and is there any sign of it stopping? Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 , little more than a week after Hamas refused to renew a six-month truce that had largely held and resumed its rocket attacks on southern Israel.
The operation’s aims were to stop Hamas’s rocket launches into southern Israeli cities and end the smuggling of weapons through tunnels under Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
Israeli intelligence repeatedly warned that Hamas was stockpiling increasingly sophisticated long-range Grad rockets, manufactured in China but passed to Hamas by Iran, along with its homemade Qassam rockets. Israel believed that unless it acted soon, Hamas’s ability to strike would present a grave danger.
That prediction proved accurate. As soon as the Israeli missiles began landing in Gaza, Hamas launched rockets that reached further than before, hitting the cities of Ashkelon, Ash-dod and Beersheba.
Last week a Grad rocket landed on Gedera, a town 28 miles from Gaza and less than a mile from the Israeli air force base at Tel Nof, where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
The wider strategic aim of the operation is the need to confront Iranian-sponsored belli-cosity. The supply of Grad rockets to Hamas followed Tehran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Shi’ite militant group which had fired rockets at Israel’s northern cities and fought a war with Israel in the summer of 2006.
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, the rising power in the region, is foremost in Israel’s thoughts. Last week in Washington, Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, warned in an interview that Iran would have enough enriched uranium this year to manufacture a nuclear bomb.
If Israel is to address such a threat militarily in the future, it will need to have subdued the immediate threats on its borders. The timing of the attack on Gaza was also influenced by the Israeli general election, due on February 10. As rockets terrorised southern Israel, the ruling coalition, led by Kadima, was increasingly open to accusations of being soft on defence and trailed the right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, in the polls.
The arithmetic of Israeli politics is fiendishly complicated, but the effect of the Gaza operation is revealed in the fortunes of the Labour party headed by Ehud Barak, the defence minister. Two weeks ago, before the attack, it was struggling in third or fourth place in the polls with only nine or 10 expected parliamentary seats (out of 120) after the elections. After a week of operations that figure had risen to 16 seats.
Likud is still leading the race with an expected 32 seats and Kadima is likely to win 27 or so seats, but the centre-left block is closing fast.
A decisive victory over Hamas may pull the rug from under the right-wing bloc and possibly allow a Barak-Livni coalition. But if Hamas can claim victory, it will strengthen Likud and its allies and Israel will probably get Netanyahu as its next prime minister.
There could be no doubt that Israel had the upper hand after two weeks of fighting, but the operation, which Barak described as one of “shock and awe”, had reached a difficult point by this weekend.
Israeli pundits all agreed that the government needed a “clear win”, such as an assurance of quiet on the southern front, to withdraw with any semblance of victory and to justify the high price of international opprobrium.
That was not even on the horizon. On Friday, Palestinian sources said Hamas’s weapons caches had been decimated and scores of the tunnels it used to import weapons had been destroyed in the bombings. But with its leadership hiding in underground bunkers or holding talks in Egypt, and only about 400 of its 15,000 officers and foot soldiers killed, the organisation was largely intact.
For Israelis this provided two starkly different choices. One was to declare victory and withdraw, either unilaterally or with a semblance of a ceasefire brokered by the international community.
The other was to implement “stage three” of Operation Cast Lead, following the initial bombing and subsequent ground assault, and continue into the crowded neighbourhoods of Gaza City and refugee camps. Here Hamas has created a virtual underground city of tunnels and the warren of alleys and narrow streets make it far more difficult for Israeli forces to manoeuvre.
Ehud Olmert, the outgoing prime minister, was said to be advocating going even further and aiming to topple Hamas. The organisation had won elections in 2006 and 18 months ago ousted Fatah, led by Mah-moud Abbas, the moderate president who runs the rival Palestinian Authority, from Gaza.
Avigdor BenGal, a decorated and influential retired Israeli general, said this weekend: “We need to conquer the Gaza Strip and put the Hamas military and political leaders on a French ship to leave Gaza for good, just as we did with [the former Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat in Beirut 1982. We’ve already conquered a bigger Arab city than Gaza [namely, Beirut], our army is trained and fit for the mission. The politicians should give the order.”
Some Fatah officials have even privately expressed the hope that Israel would rout Hamas, so stung were they by being forced out of Gaza.
Expanding the incursion would carry high risks. So far the Israeli population has supported the operation: a poll on Friday showed 91% of Israelis in favour. But that could change dramatically if casualties start piling up, as they did when an operation was launched against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 to stem the flow of missiles on Israel’s northern cities. Israel did not then secure the crushing victory to which its people were accustomed.
For Hamas, however battered, the equation is far simpler. All it has to do to declare victory is survive. The leadership is certain to reap the kudos from having stood up to the most powerful army in the Middle East without jets, tanks or sophisticated weaponry.
Hamas appeared to be regrouping after, incredibly, being shocked at the original Israeli attack. This was despite the tanks that had been massing on its borders for days and Israel’s public warnings that it would not tolerate rockets being launched on its soil.
“Hamas actually believed that firing rockets into Israel would force it to open the Rafah crossing [into Egypt],” said a senior Palestinian who has negotiated with them.
“They were shocked at the massive Israeli response. They are very naive.”
However, Izzedine al-Qas-sam, Hamas’s military wing, was said still to have high morale and other extremist groups in Gaza were fighting side by side with Hamas.
Whatever the Israelis decide to do – and there were reports that leaflets had been dropped on Gaza yesterday warning the residents to expect a dramatic escalation in hostilities – they have to do it quickly.
Israeli soldiers stationed on lines at the edge of Gaza City were increasingly becoming sitting targets. The thousands of reservists who had been called up finished a week’s training on Friday and could not be kept in the camps indefinitely; they have civilian jobs and families at home.
In addition, the Israeli government was well aware that international pressure was building, fuelled by horrific images that have emerged from Gaza despite Israel’s refusal to allow foreign journalists to enter the coastal strip.
International diplomatic efforts to end the conflict were grinding slowly forward. Both Israel and Hamas rejected a UN security council resolution that had called for an “immediate ceasefire”. Olmert called the resolution “unworkable” and Hamas rejected the resolution on the grounds that it had not been consulted.
Crucially, the Americans, Israel’s superpower sponsor, abstained from the vote, preferring to back an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. These efforts appeared to be moving ahead. General Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli official, visited Cairo last week and will do so again today, and a Hamas delegation, both from Gaza and its Damascus-based politburo, travelled to Cairo yesterday.
A senior Palestinian source who had seen the proposal said it contained four points and put Egypt as the sole broker between the two sides.
The first point, he said, called for an agreement between both “factions” on an immediate ceasefire; the second point was the opening of the Gaza border crossings to allow humanitarian aid and “Egypt to continue its efforts”; the third point was a vague provision for an international element, presumably to monitor the border; and the fourth point provided for Egypt to oversee talks between Hamas and Fatah to end their bitter dispute and form a united leadership.
Despite fighting talk from Hamas members, those dealing with them say that although they are still insisting they will not stop fighting until the Rafah crossing into Egypt is open – their key demand and their own litmus test of a real victory – they want a ceasefire.
In the longer term, both Israelis and moderate Palestinians realise that the only way forward is a political solution. Israel would love to see Abbas retake power in Gaza. Should he replace Hamas on the back of an Israeli invasion, however, he would be perceived as an Israeli stooge.
“There is no eliminating Hamas. They are part of the Palestinian people whether we like it or not,” said Ghassan Shaqa’a, a senior Palestinian politician and an adviser to Abbas. “You have to talk to them.”
Everyone is waiting for the US presidency of Barack Obama, who will be sworn in on January 20. Despite the economic crisis, sources in his administration said that he knew he would have to engage in the Middle East crisis, although he was hoping that there would be a ceasefire by the time he took office.
“God knows he will have enough on his plate, but he has to work from day one on this or the only options left will be bad ones,” said Martin Indyk, a Middle East adviser to Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state.
Indyk, the author of a new book, Innocent Abroad, based on his experience as an American ambassador to Israel, reiterated the US policy that the only solution was a two-state solution, with some special provision for Jerusalem, the city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Obama indicated last week that he could open contacts with Hamas, a first for an American president.
He is likely to begin a complicated three-way chess game involving talks with Syria and contacts of some sort with Iran. A diplomatic breakthrough with Syria could isolate Iran, a bonus in the campaign to stop it from going nuclear, and encourage other Arab states to come to the negotiating table.
“Obama won’t be able to do it alone,” Indyk said. “He’ll need leaders in the region like Anwar Sadat [the late Egyptian president and the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel in the 1970s]. The president will need to be ready to grab the moment when it arises.”
For the citizens of Gaza it cannot come too soon. Of all the suffering among Gazan civilians, few endured worse than the Samouni clan. Last week four young boys from the extended family were rescued after three days of being trapped in a home with the bodies of their mothers and relatives.
Their emaciated condition horrified aid workers who had spent days trying to get permission from the Israelis to rescue them.
Their ordeal began last Sunday, shortly after Israel invaded. Troops ordered families to gather in one large house while they searched the Zei-toun neighbourhood. On Monday morning, with about 90 men, women and children inside, three Israeli missiles slammed into the house, according to the survivors.
Sixteen were killed in the strike – seven women, six children including a baby found curled up under its dead mother’s arm, and three men. Ahmed Samouni, 15, told his tale from his hospital bed, a tube snaking out of his nose and his hands still black with blood and grime.
“Some of their heads were exploded,” he said, still shaking from the experience. “The door was open. A chicken came in and started to eat the brains from their heads. I pulled off the chicken, crawled to the door and closed it with my feet.”
Down the hall are his brother Yaqub, 10, and cousin Abdul-lah, 8, so badly wounded that they can barely speak. Another cousin is in intensive care.
Yesterday more horrors visited Gaza. Eight members of a family, including two women and two children, were killed in Jabaliya when an Israeli tank shell hit them as they sat out in their garden to bask in the unseasonable winter sun.
The neighbour who took them to hospital did so in the boot of his car because their bodies were mangled together.
Amid all the uncertainty about Israel’s intentions and the search for a ceasefire, human tragedy seems to be the only thing guaranteed.
Additional reporting: Sara Hashash; Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv; Sarah Baxter in Washington
TimesOnline
The bloodied little boy being carried into the room by a neighbour was screaming at him. “Baba, baba [daddy, daddy],” the child cried.
“I did not recognise my own child because of his injuries,” recalled Arayni. “For a few seconds I couldn’t move, my knees became weak. I could barely stand at the sight of my child halfway between life and death.”
Running over he realised that both his sons – Hathifa, 7, and Abdul Rahman, 5 – were lying in his emergency room, severely wounded.
Tears streaming down his face, Arayni began working feverishly on Hathifa, who had the worst injuries. A chunk of shrapnel had pierced his chest, his right leg was broken and blood poured from his wounds.
A colleague began treating Abdul Rahman. The nerves in his broken left arm had been severed and he had no feeling in his hand. They were able to stabilise the two boys.
“I just thank God my children didn’t arrive to me in bits and pieces, missing body parts as the women and children I see arriving daily,” said Arayni, standing by Hathifa’s bedside, his face showing the exhaustion of almost two weeks of back-to-back operations. The slight, bearded surgeon had not returned home for 12 days,grab-bing a nap or a meal at the hospital when he could.
When the Israelis launched a massive attack against Hamas, the Islamic extremist group that rules Gaza, to stop it launching rockets against Israel’s southern cities, he had moved his family from their home in Jabaliya, a crowded refugee camp just north of Gaza City. They took refuge with a relative in the more central Fakhura district, believing they would be safer.
The surgeon pushed aside the thought of his own children as the wounded poured in, sometimes so many that the operating floors were slick with blood. Injured men, women and children were piled in the corridors and surgeons commandeered the recovery room.
On Tuesday Um Mustafa, his wife, and their boys had gone up on the roof of the building, desperate for some fresh air after almost a week inside while Israeli jets screamed overhead and missiles, tank and artillery rounds pounded the coastal strip day and night.
The boys had been playing for about an hour when Um Mustafa sent them downstairs for a bottle of water. Moments later a huge explosion rocked the building, followed by a second. Two missiles had slammed into the girls’ primary school next door run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, where Gazans fleeing the fighting had been given refuge. Some 40 people, many of them women and children, were killed.
A controversy still rages over the strike on the school, one of three bombed by the Israelis within 24 hours. Israel claimed militants had fired mortars from near the school. UN officials insisted their security guards kept militants out of their compounds and that they had even given the Israeli military the GPS coordinates for their 23 schools, refuge for some 15,000 Gazans, to avert such a tragedy.
As soon as Hathifa and Abdul Rahman were stabilised, Arayni went back to operating on the casualties from the school bombing. As he left their room on Friday, leaving the boys in the care of their weeping mother, Abdul Rahman woke from a feverish sleep and began calling out for his father.
“I want my daddy. Where is he? Is he hurt?” he cried His older brother, the shrapnel still in his chest because it is too dangerous to remove, reassured him. “No, he’s treating other kids who got hurt like us,” Hathifa said.
By the standards of the past fortnight in Gaza, the Arayni boys were lucky. At the last count 830 Palestinians had been killed and some 3,000 wounded, according to health officials in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry said at least a third were children.
Israeli troops were dug in on the outskirts of Gaza City and hunkered down in Palestinian homes they had seized . Hamas’s security forces had been driven from the streets, but struck back in hit-and-run attacks from tunnels, sniped from rooftops and continued to launch rockets into Israel.
Northern Gaza was a waste-land. Whole blocks of the concrete apartment buildings and small homes of the refugee camps of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya were devastated, hit by missiles or demolished by military bulldozers.
Aid officials warned of a humanitarian disaster. The UN said two-thirds of Gazans were without electricity and half had no water. Food and medical supplies were running low.
On Wednesday Israel relented slightly, announcing it would stop firing between the hours of 1pm and 4pm to allow aid agencies to deliver supplies.
Nevertheless, it showed no sign of ending its operations any time soon. From Israel’s perspective it is fighting a crucial battle, backed by near-unanimous popular support, against an enemy committed to its ultimate destruction and which has continued to target its citizens in the south.
There was more evidence of that yesterday as at least 10 Hamas rockets were fired at Israeli targets. One hit a block of flats in the city of Ashkelon, wounding two people.
“Israel has acted, is acting and will act only according to its considerations, the security needs of its citizens and its right to self-defence,” Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and the ruling Kadima party’s candidate for prime minister, said on Friday.
How close is Israel to achieving its goals? What has the bloodshed achieved and is there any sign of it stopping? Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 , little more than a week after Hamas refused to renew a six-month truce that had largely held and resumed its rocket attacks on southern Israel.
The operation’s aims were to stop Hamas’s rocket launches into southern Israeli cities and end the smuggling of weapons through tunnels under Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
Israeli intelligence repeatedly warned that Hamas was stockpiling increasingly sophisticated long-range Grad rockets, manufactured in China but passed to Hamas by Iran, along with its homemade Qassam rockets. Israel believed that unless it acted soon, Hamas’s ability to strike would present a grave danger.
That prediction proved accurate. As soon as the Israeli missiles began landing in Gaza, Hamas launched rockets that reached further than before, hitting the cities of Ashkelon, Ash-dod and Beersheba.
Last week a Grad rocket landed on Gedera, a town 28 miles from Gaza and less than a mile from the Israeli air force base at Tel Nof, where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
The wider strategic aim of the operation is the need to confront Iranian-sponsored belli-cosity. The supply of Grad rockets to Hamas followed Tehran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Shi’ite militant group which had fired rockets at Israel’s northern cities and fought a war with Israel in the summer of 2006.
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, the rising power in the region, is foremost in Israel’s thoughts. Last week in Washington, Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, warned in an interview that Iran would have enough enriched uranium this year to manufacture a nuclear bomb.
If Israel is to address such a threat militarily in the future, it will need to have subdued the immediate threats on its borders. The timing of the attack on Gaza was also influenced by the Israeli general election, due on February 10. As rockets terrorised southern Israel, the ruling coalition, led by Kadima, was increasingly open to accusations of being soft on defence and trailed the right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, in the polls.
The arithmetic of Israeli politics is fiendishly complicated, but the effect of the Gaza operation is revealed in the fortunes of the Labour party headed by Ehud Barak, the defence minister. Two weeks ago, before the attack, it was struggling in third or fourth place in the polls with only nine or 10 expected parliamentary seats (out of 120) after the elections. After a week of operations that figure had risen to 16 seats.
Likud is still leading the race with an expected 32 seats and Kadima is likely to win 27 or so seats, but the centre-left block is closing fast.
A decisive victory over Hamas may pull the rug from under the right-wing bloc and possibly allow a Barak-Livni coalition. But if Hamas can claim victory, it will strengthen Likud and its allies and Israel will probably get Netanyahu as its next prime minister.
There could be no doubt that Israel had the upper hand after two weeks of fighting, but the operation, which Barak described as one of “shock and awe”, had reached a difficult point by this weekend.
Israeli pundits all agreed that the government needed a “clear win”, such as an assurance of quiet on the southern front, to withdraw with any semblance of victory and to justify the high price of international opprobrium.
That was not even on the horizon. On Friday, Palestinian sources said Hamas’s weapons caches had been decimated and scores of the tunnels it used to import weapons had been destroyed in the bombings. But with its leadership hiding in underground bunkers or holding talks in Egypt, and only about 400 of its 15,000 officers and foot soldiers killed, the organisation was largely intact.
For Israelis this provided two starkly different choices. One was to declare victory and withdraw, either unilaterally or with a semblance of a ceasefire brokered by the international community.
The other was to implement “stage three” of Operation Cast Lead, following the initial bombing and subsequent ground assault, and continue into the crowded neighbourhoods of Gaza City and refugee camps. Here Hamas has created a virtual underground city of tunnels and the warren of alleys and narrow streets make it far more difficult for Israeli forces to manoeuvre.
Ehud Olmert, the outgoing prime minister, was said to be advocating going even further and aiming to topple Hamas. The organisation had won elections in 2006 and 18 months ago ousted Fatah, led by Mah-moud Abbas, the moderate president who runs the rival Palestinian Authority, from Gaza.
Avigdor BenGal, a decorated and influential retired Israeli general, said this weekend: “We need to conquer the Gaza Strip and put the Hamas military and political leaders on a French ship to leave Gaza for good, just as we did with [the former Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat in Beirut 1982. We’ve already conquered a bigger Arab city than Gaza [namely, Beirut], our army is trained and fit for the mission. The politicians should give the order.”
Some Fatah officials have even privately expressed the hope that Israel would rout Hamas, so stung were they by being forced out of Gaza.
Expanding the incursion would carry high risks. So far the Israeli population has supported the operation: a poll on Friday showed 91% of Israelis in favour. But that could change dramatically if casualties start piling up, as they did when an operation was launched against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 to stem the flow of missiles on Israel’s northern cities. Israel did not then secure the crushing victory to which its people were accustomed.
For Hamas, however battered, the equation is far simpler. All it has to do to declare victory is survive. The leadership is certain to reap the kudos from having stood up to the most powerful army in the Middle East without jets, tanks or sophisticated weaponry.
Hamas appeared to be regrouping after, incredibly, being shocked at the original Israeli attack. This was despite the tanks that had been massing on its borders for days and Israel’s public warnings that it would not tolerate rockets being launched on its soil.
“Hamas actually believed that firing rockets into Israel would force it to open the Rafah crossing [into Egypt],” said a senior Palestinian who has negotiated with them.
“They were shocked at the massive Israeli response. They are very naive.”
However, Izzedine al-Qas-sam, Hamas’s military wing, was said still to have high morale and other extremist groups in Gaza were fighting side by side with Hamas.
Whatever the Israelis decide to do – and there were reports that leaflets had been dropped on Gaza yesterday warning the residents to expect a dramatic escalation in hostilities – they have to do it quickly.
Israeli soldiers stationed on lines at the edge of Gaza City were increasingly becoming sitting targets. The thousands of reservists who had been called up finished a week’s training on Friday and could not be kept in the camps indefinitely; they have civilian jobs and families at home.
In addition, the Israeli government was well aware that international pressure was building, fuelled by horrific images that have emerged from Gaza despite Israel’s refusal to allow foreign journalists to enter the coastal strip.
International diplomatic efforts to end the conflict were grinding slowly forward. Both Israel and Hamas rejected a UN security council resolution that had called for an “immediate ceasefire”. Olmert called the resolution “unworkable” and Hamas rejected the resolution on the grounds that it had not been consulted.
Crucially, the Americans, Israel’s superpower sponsor, abstained from the vote, preferring to back an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. These efforts appeared to be moving ahead. General Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli official, visited Cairo last week and will do so again today, and a Hamas delegation, both from Gaza and its Damascus-based politburo, travelled to Cairo yesterday.
A senior Palestinian source who had seen the proposal said it contained four points and put Egypt as the sole broker between the two sides.
The first point, he said, called for an agreement between both “factions” on an immediate ceasefire; the second point was the opening of the Gaza border crossings to allow humanitarian aid and “Egypt to continue its efforts”; the third point was a vague provision for an international element, presumably to monitor the border; and the fourth point provided for Egypt to oversee talks between Hamas and Fatah to end their bitter dispute and form a united leadership.
Despite fighting talk from Hamas members, those dealing with them say that although they are still insisting they will not stop fighting until the Rafah crossing into Egypt is open – their key demand and their own litmus test of a real victory – they want a ceasefire.
In the longer term, both Israelis and moderate Palestinians realise that the only way forward is a political solution. Israel would love to see Abbas retake power in Gaza. Should he replace Hamas on the back of an Israeli invasion, however, he would be perceived as an Israeli stooge.
“There is no eliminating Hamas. They are part of the Palestinian people whether we like it or not,” said Ghassan Shaqa’a, a senior Palestinian politician and an adviser to Abbas. “You have to talk to them.”
Everyone is waiting for the US presidency of Barack Obama, who will be sworn in on January 20. Despite the economic crisis, sources in his administration said that he knew he would have to engage in the Middle East crisis, although he was hoping that there would be a ceasefire by the time he took office.
“God knows he will have enough on his plate, but he has to work from day one on this or the only options left will be bad ones,” said Martin Indyk, a Middle East adviser to Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state.
Indyk, the author of a new book, Innocent Abroad, based on his experience as an American ambassador to Israel, reiterated the US policy that the only solution was a two-state solution, with some special provision for Jerusalem, the city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Obama indicated last week that he could open contacts with Hamas, a first for an American president.
He is likely to begin a complicated three-way chess game involving talks with Syria and contacts of some sort with Iran. A diplomatic breakthrough with Syria could isolate Iran, a bonus in the campaign to stop it from going nuclear, and encourage other Arab states to come to the negotiating table.
“Obama won’t be able to do it alone,” Indyk said. “He’ll need leaders in the region like Anwar Sadat [the late Egyptian president and the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel in the 1970s]. The president will need to be ready to grab the moment when it arises.”
For the citizens of Gaza it cannot come too soon. Of all the suffering among Gazan civilians, few endured worse than the Samouni clan. Last week four young boys from the extended family were rescued after three days of being trapped in a home with the bodies of their mothers and relatives.
Their emaciated condition horrified aid workers who had spent days trying to get permission from the Israelis to rescue them.
Their ordeal began last Sunday, shortly after Israel invaded. Troops ordered families to gather in one large house while they searched the Zei-toun neighbourhood. On Monday morning, with about 90 men, women and children inside, three Israeli missiles slammed into the house, according to the survivors.
Sixteen were killed in the strike – seven women, six children including a baby found curled up under its dead mother’s arm, and three men. Ahmed Samouni, 15, told his tale from his hospital bed, a tube snaking out of his nose and his hands still black with blood and grime.
“Some of their heads were exploded,” he said, still shaking from the experience. “The door was open. A chicken came in and started to eat the brains from their heads. I pulled off the chicken, crawled to the door and closed it with my feet.”
Down the hall are his brother Yaqub, 10, and cousin Abdul-lah, 8, so badly wounded that they can barely speak. Another cousin is in intensive care.
Yesterday more horrors visited Gaza. Eight members of a family, including two women and two children, were killed in Jabaliya when an Israeli tank shell hit them as they sat out in their garden to bask in the unseasonable winter sun.
The neighbour who took them to hospital did so in the boot of his car because their bodies were mangled together.
Amid all the uncertainty about Israel’s intentions and the search for a ceasefire, human tragedy seems to be the only thing guaranteed.
Additional reporting: Sara Hashash; Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv; Sarah Baxter in Washington
TimesOnline
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