Gaza campaign: Jet strikes continue despite pleas for calm

Aircraft strikes three training facilities; drone shot down.

GAZA CITY:

Israel kept up air strikes and artillery fire on the Gaza Strip on Monday despite diplomatic efforts to halt the bloodshed.

With the offensive in its seventh day, the death toll from the punishing air assault hit 172, with another 1,230 wounded.

Aircraft struck three training facilities of Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine al Qassam Brigades, around the coastal territory, but caused no casualties, medics and eyewitnesses said.

They also hit buildings in Gaza City, Deir el Balah in the southern part of the strip, and in the northern town of Jabaliya, injuring an unspecified number of people.

There was shelling reported in Beit Lahiya, in the far north of the strip, where Israel had earlier warned residents of an impending assault.

Israel also moved against Hamas in the occupied West Bank, arresting at least five of the movement’s lawmakers in Nablus and Jenin, Palestinian security officials told AFP.

The military said it had shot down a drone from Gaza, the first reported deployment of an unmanned aircraft by Palestinian militants whose rocket attacks have been regularly intercepted. The use of a drone would mark a step up in the sophistication of the Palestinian arsenal, although it was not immediately clear whether it was armed.

Shelter in UN camps

Fearing for their lives, about 17,000 people have taken shelter in installations of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, the agency said in a statement.

Despite increasing calls for a ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was hitting Hamas “with growing force”, warning there was no end in sight.

“We do not know when this operation will end,” he told ministers.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon said “too many” Palestinian civilians have been killed.

Ban also urged Israel to scrap plans for a potentially devastating ground offensive, fears of which have sent Gazans fleeing from the north.

Israeli media reported that a security cabinet meeting ended late Sunday with no orders for a ground assault.

Israeli army radio quoted security sources “at the most senior level” as saying that there were “four channels for attempts to reach a ceasefire — Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, the Americans and the Egyptians.”

Hamas lays out truce terms

The Hamas movement said Monday it would not end hostilities with Israel without concessions by the Jewish state and that no serious efforts towards a truce had been made. “Talk of a ceasefire requires real and serious efforts, which we haven’t seen so far,” Hamas MP Mushir al-Masri told AFP in Gaza City.

Masri said Hamas would only negotiate on the basis of a set of concessions it wants to see Israel agree to.

Those include the lifting of Israel’s eight-year blockade on the Gaza Strip, the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the release of Palestinian prisoners Israel has rearrested after freeing them in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.

“Any ceasefire must be based on the conditions we have outlined, nothing less than that will be accepted,” Masri said. 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15^th, 2014.