JERUSALEM: A brief Israeli truce to allow aid to reach Palestinians ended on Monday amid accusations of strikes by both sides, while Jerusalem was rocked by two attacks that appeared to be a backlash against the war in Gaza.
Palestinians said Israel had bombed a refugee camp in Gaza City, killing an eight-year-old girl and wounding 29 other people, in an air attack after the start of the truce.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said there had been no strikes during the seven-hour truce, which started at 0700 GMT. She said four rockets had been fired from Gaza later and two had crashed inside Israel. There were no casualties or damage.
In Jerusalem, a Palestinian driving an excavator ran over and killed an Israeli and then overturned a bus, in what police described as a terrorist attack. Police shot the excavator driver dead; there were no passengers on the bus.
Several hours later, a man shot and wounded a soldier near Jerusalem’s Hebrew University before fleeing on a motorcycle.
Israel had announced its ceasefire to free up humanitarian aid and allow some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by almost four weeks of war to go home.
The Israeli military is wrapping up the main objective of the ground assault, the destruction of cross-border infiltration tunnels from Gaza, and it has told residents of some towns they can return home.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, however, Israeli forces would be on both sides of the border once the tunnels operation ended.
“The campaign in the Gaza Strip goes on,” said a statement from Netanyahu’s office. “What is about to end is the Israeli military’s handling of the tunnels, but the operation will end only when a prolonged period of quiet and security is restored to Israel’s citizens.”
Israel launched its offensive on July 8 following what it called a surge in Hamas rocket salvoes. It escalated from air and naval barrages to overland incursions centred on Gaza’s tunnel-riddled eastern frontier, but also pushed into densely populated towns.
Gaza officials say 1,831 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed and more than a quarter of the impoverished enclave’s 1.8 million residents displaced. As many as 3,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed or damaged.
Israel has lost 64 soldiers in combat and three civilians to Palestinian cross-border rocket and mortar fire that has emptied many of its southern villages.
Iron Dome interceptors, air raid sirens and public shelters have helped stem Israeli casualties.
CAIRO NEGOTIATIONS: Palestinian groups, including representatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, held their first formal meeting in Cairo on Monday with Egyptian mediators hoping to pave the way towards a durable ceasefire agreement with Israel.
Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2014
