GAZA CITY:
As the Palestinian death toll topped 1,000 Israel on Saturday approved a four-hour extension of a temporary truce in Gaza, Israeli television said.
Channel 10 said the Israeli security cabinet had agreed to prolong a 12-hour truce that went into effect on Saturday morning by four hours, extending it until midnight local time.
The decision came after US Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers from Europe and the Middle East urged Israel and the Hamas movement to extend the fragile truce.
“We all call on parties to extend the humanitarian ceasefire,” France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters in Paris after meeting Kerry and foreign ministers from Britain, Germany, Italy, Qatar and Turkey, as well as an EU representative.
After the 12-hour ceasefire went into effect, medics in Gaza began digging through the remains of hundreds of homes, and uncovered more than 130 bodies. The grim discoveries pushed the Palestinian toll in Gaza to more than 1,000 since the conflict erupted on July 8.
On the ground, Palestinian ambulances sped into Gaza neighbourhoods that have been too dangerous to enter for days. Nine hours into the truce, they had found the bodies of more than 130 people in the debris.
Palestinians ventured onto Gaza’s streets after the truce began, some eager to check homes they had fled, others to stock up on supplies while it was safe to do so.
In many places they found astonishing devastation: buildings levelled, entire blocks of homes completely wiped out by Israeli bombardment.
In northern Beit Hanun, even the hospital was badly damaged by shelling.
There were similar scenes in Shejaiya, where stiff bodies lay on the floor of a room in one building, one caked in dried blood, all of them covered in dust.
East of southern Khan Yunis, residents hesitated to enter the Khuzaa neighbourhood, saying Israeli forces remained inside the border area.
And in nearby Bani Suheila, where 20 people were killed in a single Israeli air strike shortly before the truce began, women and children wept as they discovered their homes destroyed.
Hamas and Israel agreed to the ‘humanitarian window’ early on Saturday, after Israel’s security cabinet on Friday night rejected a US proposal for a seven-day truce during which the two sides would negotiate a longer-term deal.
Speaking after the rejection, at a news conference in Cairo with UN chief Ban Ki-moon, Kerry said Israel and Hamas ‘still have some terminology’ to agree to on a ceasefire, but added they had ‘fundamental framework’ on a truce.
The two sides remain at odds over the shape of a final deal to end the fighting, however.
Hamas says any truce must include a guaranteed end to Israel’s eight-year blockade of Gaza, while in Israel there are calls for any deal to include the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip.
International concern has mounted over the number of civilians killed in Gaza, including in a Thursday attack in which at least 15 people were killed in alleged Israeli shelling of a UN school.
Rights groups say about 80 per cent of the casualties have been civilians, and the UN agency for children UNICEF said on Friday that 192 children had been killed during the conflict.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 27th, 2014.
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