A man weeping at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital after an explosion killed eight children in a public playground in the beachfront Shati refugee camp yesterday. Palestinian medical sources blamed the killings on air strikes launched by the Israeli military.
Reuters
Gaza City
|
|
A grim-faced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday warned of a protracted war in Gaza, dashing any hopes of a swift end to the three-week conflict as Palestinian fighters launched an audacious cross-border raid.
The Israeli army said five of its soldiers died in two separate incidents, including four in a mortar strike. Local media also reported casualties in the infiltration, but there was no immediate confirmation of this.
Inside Gaza itself, eight children and two adults were killed by a blast in a park as an unofficial truce sought by the UN for the Eid al-Fitr festival collapsed.
Residents blamed the park explosion on an Israeli air attack.
“It has been a difficult, painful day,” Netanyahu said in a televised address to the nation.
“We need to be prepared for a protracted campaign. We will continue to act with force and discretion until our mission is accomplished,” he said, adding that Israeli troops would not leave Gaza until they had destroyed Hamas’s tunnel network.
Some 1,060 Gazans, most of them civilians, have died in the conflagration. Israel has lost 48 soldiers and another three civilians have been killed by Palestinian shelling.
As night fell over Gaza, army flares illuminated the sky and the sound of intense shelling could be heard. The military warned thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in areas around Gaza City - usually the prelude to major army strikes.
The explosion of violence, after a day of relative calm, appeared to wreck international hopes of turning a brief lull in fighting into a longer-term ceasefire.
Gaza’s Hamas leaders said they had accepted a UN call for a pause in hostilities yesterday to coincide with Eid.
Israel initially baulked, having abandoned its own offer to extend a 12-hour truce from Saturday when rockets kept flying. However, calm gradually descended through the night with just the occasional exchange of fire heard until a series of blasts shook Gaza in the afternoon.
Pools of blood lay on the ground in the Beach refugee camp garden in northern Gaza after it was hit by a huge explosion.
“We came out of the mosque when I saw the children playing with their toy guns. Seconds later a missile landed,” said Munther al-Derbi, a resident of the camp.
“May God punish ... Netanyahu,” he said.
At roughly the same time, another blast shook the grounds of Gaza’s main Shifa hospital. Israel has previously accused Hamas fighters of hiding in the hospital.
Foreign pressure has been building on Netanyahu to muzzle his forces, with both US President Barack Obama and the UN Security Council urging an immediate ceasefire that would allow relief to reach Gaza’s 1.8mn Palestinians, followed by negotiations on a more durable cessation of hostilities.
In his television address, Netanyahu said any solution to the crisis would need to see Hamas stripped of its weapons.
Hamas said its forces had infiltrated Israel to retaliate for the killing of the children in the Beach camp.
“His threats do not frighten either Hamas or the Palestinian people, and the (Israeli) occupation will pay the price for its massacres against children and civilians,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Speaking in New York, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon deplored what he described as a lack of resolve among all parties in the conflict.
“It’s a matter of their political will. They have to show their humanity as leaders, both Israeli and Palestinian,” he told reporters. “Why these leaders are making their people to be killed by others? It’s not responsible, (it’s) morally wrong.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry visited the region last week to try to stem the bloodshed.
Tension between Netanyahu’s government and Washington has flared over US mediation efforts, adding yet another chapter to the prickly relations between the Israeli leader and Obama.
Qatar’s Foreign Minister HE Dr Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah said Israel had not respected a ceasefire agreement brokered by Cairo that ended the last Gaza war in 2012 and it was time the blockade of the coastal enclave - also enforced by next-door Egypt - was lifted.
