Netanyahu Backs Palestinian State, With Caveats

June 15, 2009
By ISABEL KERSHNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html?hp

JERUSALEM — The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sunday endorsed for the first time the principle of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but on condition that the state was demilitarized and that the Palestinians recognized Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

In a much-anticipated speech meant in part as an answer to President Obama’s address in Cairo on June 4, Mr. Netanyahu reversed his longstanding opposition to Palestinian statehood, a move seen as a concession to American pressure.

But he firmly rejected American demands for a complete freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the subject of a rare public dispute between Israel and its most important ally on an issue seen as critical to peace negotiations.

And even his assent on Palestinian statehood, given the caveats, was immediately rejected as a nonstarter by Palestinians.

In a half-hour speech broadcast live in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu, the leader of the conservative Likud Party, laid out what he called his “vision of peace”: “In this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.”

But Mr. Netanyahu insisted on “ironclad” guarantees from the United States and the international community for Palestinian demilitarization and recognition of Israel’s Jewish character.

Given those conditions, Mr. Netanyahu said, “We will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state.” He also said that no new settlements would be created and no more land would be expropriated for expansion, but that “normal life” must be allowed to continue in the settlements, a term he has used to mean that limited building should be allowed to continue within existing settlements to accommodate “natural growth.”

While this position did not diverge from Mr. Netanyahu’s previous statements, he delivered it on Sunday in the context of a speech he had billed as a major foreign policy address, one he had personally urged Mr. Obama to watch. It came 10 days after Mr. Obama bluntly rejected “the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

The White House reaction was positive, if limited, focusing on what it called “the important step forward” of Mr. Netanyahu’s support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a statement, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, reiterated the president’s vow for a two-state solution that “can and must ensure both Israel’s security and the fulfillment of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for a viable state,” and he said that Mr. Obama “welcomes Prime Minister Netanyahu’s endorsement of that goal.”

Indeed, in moving closer to the American and international consensus for a two-state solution, Mr. Netanyahu risked alienating right-wing ideologues within his party and his governing coalition. Ron Dermer, the prime minister’s director of communications and policy planning, said that in accepting the notion of a Palestinian state, Mr. Netanyahu had “crossed a personal Rubicon.”

Citing the biblical vision of Isaiah of swords beaten into plowshares, Mr. Netanyahu said of the Palestinians, “We do not want to rule over them, to govern their lives, or to impose our flag or our culture on them.”

But beyond the idea of a state, he seemed to offer little room for compromise or negotiation.

He referred repeatedly to the West Bank, the territory presumed to comprise the bulk of a future Palestinian state, by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria, declaring it “the land of our forefathers.”

Mr. Netanyahu made no mention of existing frameworks for negotiations, like the American-backed 2003 peace plan known as the road map.

He did not address the geographical area a Palestinian state might cover, and he said that the Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved outside Israel’s borders, negating the Palestinian demand for a right of return for refugees of the 1948 war and for their millions of descendants.

He insisted that Jerusalem remain united as the Israeli capital. The Palestinians demand the eastern part of the city as a future capital.

“Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about negotiations, but left us with nothing to negotiate as he systematically took nearly every permanent status issue off the table,” Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement. “Nor did he accept a Palestinian state. Instead, he announced a series of conditions and qualifications that render a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state impossible.”

Palestinian negotiators have long refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, contending that it would prejudge the refugees’ demand for a right of return and would be detrimental to the status of Israel’s Arab minority.

Mr. Dermer, the communications director for Mr. Netanyahu, said that Palestinians’ recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was “not a precondition” for negotiations. But, he said, “there will not be an agreement without that recognition.”

Mr. Netanyahu delivered his speech to an invited audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. The university is an academic bastion of Israel’s national-religious camp.

Timed to coincide with the Israeli evening television news, the speech was rich in Zionist rhetoric and seemed aimed as much at Israelis as at the Obama administration. Experts said it was unlikely to cause a political earthquake here, since it largely expressed the consensus in Israel.

“It was a balanced speech that the coalition can live with,” said Prof. Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center.

Contrary to the expectations of many here, Mr. Netanyahu did not make the threat of a nuclear Iran a focal point, though he described it as one of the greatest challenges facing Israel, along with the global economic crisis and forging of peace.

He called on Arab leaders to meet with him to discuss peace, and for Arab countries and entrepreneurs to help in lifting the Palestinian economy and to engage in regional projects with Israel.

Regarding Gaza, where the militant Islamic movement Hamas holds sway, Mr. Netanyahu said it is up to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority to establish the rule of law there and “overcome” the group.

Mr. Netanyahu announced a week ago that he would deliver a major policy speech, leading to feverish speculation up to the last minute of what it would contain. The Israeli leader spent much of the last week in consultation with political partners and potential rivals and met twice with the country’s experienced and popular president, Shimon Peres.

Mr. Peres said in a statement that the speech was “true and courageous” and that it constituted an opening toward “direct negotiations for both a regional peace and a bilateral peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

World Watches for Washington Shift on Mideast

May 17, 2009
By HELENE COOPER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17prexy.html?_r=1&hp

WASHINGTON — Five weeks ago, President Obama stood before the Turkish legislature in Ankara and said that many Americans had Muslims in their families or had lived in a Muslim-majority country. “I know,” he said, “because I am one of them.”

But will that exposure lead Mr. Obama to take a different tack from his predecessors in his dealings with Israel?

That question, which has captivated a wide spectrum of people, from America’s Israel lobby to its Palestinian-Americans to the Muslim world at large, will take center stage on Monday, when Israel’s new and hawkish prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has his first face-to-face meeting with Mr. Obama since he became president.

“This is a piece of the cloud that’s hovering over this meeting: is this man different?” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator at the State Department and the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” “The fact that he’s African-American. The fact that his middle name is Hussein. The fact that the world for him is not black or white, that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not black and white, there is gray, and in that gray lies the ability of this president to understand the needs and requirements of Palestinians. Is that on Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind? There’s no question that that’s there.”

Mr. Obama’s past suggests why, four months into his presidency, the answer to the question remains elusive. His first book, “Dreams From My Father,” delves deeply into matters of race and nationality and the need to belong somewhere, issues that permeate the Arab-Israeli conflict. But in the book Mr. Obama does not address specifically how he views Israel and the plight of the Palestinians.

As a state senator in Chicago, Mr. Obama cultivated friendships with Arab-Americans, including Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American scholar and a critic of Israel. Mr. Obama and Mr. Khalidi had many dinners together, friends said, in which they discussed Palestinian issues.

During the 1990s, Mr. Obama also frequently attended tributes to Arab-Americans, where he often seemed “empathetic” to the cause of Palestinians, said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American journalist who lives in Chicago.

This contrasts with the more “tabula rasa” image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that many of Mr. Obama’s predecessors brought to their presidencies — a blank slate that was then shaped by the strong alliance with Israel that is a fixture of politics in the United States, many Middle East experts say.

“I think this president gets it, in terms of the suffering of the Palestinians,” said Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “He gets it, which is already light years ahead of the average elected American politician.”

Mr. Obama’s predecessors, President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, came of age politically with the American-Israeli viewpoint of the Middle East conflict as their primary tutor, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. While each often expressed concern and empathy for the Palestinians — with Mr. Clinton, in particular, pushing hard for Middle East peace during the last months of his presidency — their early perspectives were shaped more by Israelis and American Jews than by Muslims, Mr. Levy said.

“I think that Barack Obama, on this issue as well as many other issues, brings a fresh approach and a fresh background,” Mr. Levy said. “He’s certainly familiar with Israel’s concerns and with the closeness of the Israel-America relationship and with that narrative. But what I think might be different is a familiarity that I think President Obama almost certainly has with where the Palestinian grievance narrative is coming from.”

In an interview broadcast Saturday on Israeli television, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said he believed that Mr. Netanyahu, in what would be a significant shift, would endorse the creation of a Palestinian state during his meeting with Mr. Obama.

None of this necessarily means that Mr. Obama will chart a course that is different from his predecessors’. During the presidential campaign he struck a position on Israel that was indistinguishable from those of his rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator John McCain, even going so far as to say in 2008 that he supported Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (He later attributed that statement to “poor phrasing in the speech,” telling Fareed Zakaria of CNN that he meant to say he did not want barbed wire running through Jerusalem.)

Still, many Palestinian-Americans who hoped that Mr. Obama would come into office and quickly seek to press the Israeli government on Palestinian issues have been disappointed.

“In practice, despite the hype, there is much more continuity with previous administrations,” Mr. Abunimah said. “People get carried away with the atmospheric change, but the substance of the U.S. policy towards Israel has been the same policy.”

Last year, for instance, Mr. Obama was quick to distance himself from Robert Malley, an informal adviser to his campaign, when reports arose that Mr. Malley, a special adviser to Mr. Clinton, had had direct contacts with Hamas, the militant Islamist organization that won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and that controls Gaza. Similarly, he distanced himself from Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser who was often critical of Israel, after complaints from some pro-Israel groups.

And Mr. Obama offered no public support for the appointment of Mr. Freeman to a top intelligence post in March after several congressional representatives and lobbyists complained that Mr. Freeman had an irrational hatred of Israel. Mr. Freeman angrily withdrew from consideration for the post.

But Mr. Freeman, in a telephone interview last week, said he still believed that Mr. Obama would go where his predecessors did not on Israel. Mr. Obama’s appointment of Gen. James L. Jones as his national security adviser — a man who has worked with Palestinians and Israelis to try to open up movement for Palestinians on the ground and who has sometimes irritated Israeli military officials — could foreshadow friction between the Obama administration and the Israeli government, several Middle East experts said.

The same is true for the appointment of George J. Mitchell as Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the region; Mr. Mitchell, who helped negotiate peace in Northern Ireland, has already hinted privately that the administration may have to look for ways to include Hamas, in some fashion, in a unity Palestinian government.

Mr. Obama’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, while crucial, may only preview the beginning of the path the president will take, Mr. Freeman said.

“You can’t really tell anything by what happened to me and the fact that he didn’t step forward to take on the skunks,” he said, referring to his own appointment controversy and Mr. Obama’s silence amid critics’ attacks. “The first nine months, Nixon was absolutely horrible on China. In retrospect, it was clear that he had every intention to charge ahead, but he was picking his moment. He didn’t want to have the fight before he had to have the fight.”

“I sense that Obama is picking his moment,” Mr. Freeman said.

Ben Werschkul contributed reporting.

Research on Lesser-Known Nazi Sites Is Now Public

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/middleeast/20holocaust.html
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: April 19, 2009
JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.

Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of the gas chambers in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about the hundreds — perhaps thousands — of smaller killing fields across the former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths.

That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites, comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, cross-checking numbers and methods. The work, gathered under the title “The Untold Stories,” is far from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts Monday evening, the research is being made public on the institution’s Web site.

“These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved smaller towns and villages,” said David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. “In many cases, locals played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next. This provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa.”

For the purposes of this project, a killing field entailed at least 50 people, Lea Prais, the project director, said. The murdering began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic Republics in the north to the Caucuses in the south, Nazi death squads combed the areas.

The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet collaborators.

The new research checks those versions against German records, diaries and letters of soldiers, and accounts by witnesses and the few surviving Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes, the researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is noted on the Web site. One goal of the project is to gain greater specificity of the numbers killed.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed actual killings in Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who claimed to have been a bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, “After the civilian guards with the yellow armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.

At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand.”

Ms. Prais, the project director, said one of the discoveries that most surprised her is the way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to commemorate those who perished. In distant fields and village squares they often placed a Star of David or some other memorial despite fears of overt Jewish expression in the Soviet era.

“The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent,” she said.

The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One case Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what happened in the town of Krupki in Belarus, where the entire Jewish community of at least 1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.

A German soldier who took part in the mass murder kept a diary that was found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of having volunteered as one of “15 men with strong nerves” asked to eliminate the Jews of Krupki. “All these had to be shot today,” he wrote. The weather was gray and rainy, he observed.

The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany but as they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident. Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time controlling the crowd.

“Ten shots rang out, ten Jews popped off,” he wrote. “This continued until all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won’t forget this spectacle in a hurry....”

American citizen shot in the head by Israeli forces in West Bank

Various, Friday, March 13th, 2009

AMERICAN CITIZEN CRITICALLY INJURED AFTER BEING SHOT IN THE HEAD BY ISRAELI FORCES IN NI’LIN

The link to watch for this story:
http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324

For Immediate Release


13th March 2009, Ni’lin Village--An American citizen has been critically injured in the village of Ni’lin after Israeli forces shot him in the head with a tear-gas canister.

Tristan Anderson from California USA, 37 years old, has been taken to Israeli hospital Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. Anderson is unconscious and has been bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth. He sustained a large hole in his forehead where he was struck by the canister. He is currently being operated on.

Tristan was shot by the new tear-gas canisters that can be shot up to 500m. I ran over as I saw someone had been shot, while the Israeli forces continued to fire tear-gas at us. When an ambulance came, the Israeli soldiers refused to allow the ambulance through the checkpoint just outside the village. After 5 minutes of arguing with the soldiers, the ambulance passed.

The Israeli army began using to use a high velocity tear gas canister in December 2008. The black canister, labeled in Hebrew as “40mm bullet special/long range,” can shoot over 400 meters. The gas canister does not make a noise when fired or emit a smoke tail. A combination of the canister’s high velocity and silence is extremely dangerous and has caused numerous injuries, including a Palestinian male whose leg was broken in January 2009.

Please Contact: Adam Taylor (English), ISM Media Office +972 8503948
Sasha Solanas (English), ISM Media Office - +972 549032981
Woody Berch (English), at Tel Hashomer hospital +972 548053082

Tristan Anderson

Tristan Anderson was shot as Israeli forces attacked a demonstration against the construction of the annexation wall through the village of Ni’lin’s land. Another resident from Ni’lin was shot in the leg with live ammunition.

Four Ni’lin residents have been killed during demonstrations against the confiscation of their land.

Ahmed Mousa (10) was shot in the forehead with live ammunition on 29th July 2008. The following day, Yousef Amira (17) was shot twice with rubber-coated steel bullets, leaving him brain dead. He died a week later on 4 August 2008. Arafat Rateb Khawaje (22), was the third Ni’lin resident to be killed by Israeli forces. He was shot in the back with live ammunition on 28 December 2008. That same day, Mohammed Khawaje (20), was shot in the head with live ammunition, leaving him brain dead. He died three days in a Ramallah hospital.

Residents in the village of Ni’lin have been demonstrating against the construction of the Apartheid Wall, deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. Ni’lin will lose approximately 2500 dunums of agricultural land when the construction of the Wall is completed. Ni’lin was 57,000 dunums in 1948, reduced to 33,000 dunums in 1967, currently is 10,000 dunums and will be 7,500 dunums after the construction of the Wall.

Updates:

Orly Levi, a spokeswoman at the Tel Hashomer hospital, tells Ha’aretz:

He’s in critical condition, anesthetized and on a ventilator and undergoing imaging tests,” She described Anderson’s condition as life-threatening.

Israeli activist Jonathan Pollack told Ynet:

… the firing incident took place inside the village and not next to the fence. There were clashes in the earlier hours, but he wasn’t part of them. He didn’t throw stones and wasn’t standing next to the stone throwers.

There was really no reason to fire at them. The Dutch girl standing next to him was not hurt. It only injured him, like a bullet.

Senate Will Vote Tonight!! No Discrimination Against Palestinian Refugees in Gaza

The Senate will vote tonight on Senator Kyl's amendment. The late breaking nature of the amendment means even just a few letters faxed to some key Senators could determine the outcome of this vote.

Add your name to our letter opposing the Kyl amendment and we'll fax it automatically to your Senators' offices.

Background Information
The recent fighting between Israel and Palestinian armed groups (including Hamas) left at least1300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead. In addition, schools, universities, mosques and thousands of homes in Gaza were destroyed. In surveying the damages in Gaza, Amnesty International researcher Donatella Rovera said "there is no camera lens wide enough to capture the destruction," adding that Gaza looked like a "moonscape."

The conflict only exacerbated the dismal conditions that were set in place well before the fighting broke out between Israel and Hamas. Hospitals faced severe electrical and supply shortages and some hospitals were only able to function for a few hours a day. Of the estimated 5,000 wounded Palestinians, many have not been able to seek proper medical attention because the facilities in Gaza are inadequate and often the wounded were prevented from entering Egypt or Israel for treatment. Amnesty International also reported that schools have not been able to fully operate because they have not received the paper needed to print textbooks. Employment continues to be a problem with the blockade affecting many factories and other factories being destroyed during the recent conflict. According to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, unemployment in Gaza reached 45% in June 2008, the highest in the world.

The US has taken an important step in pledging $900 million in humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. But some of the aid, such as basic foods supplies like pasta, are still prevented by Israel from entering Gaza, a fact that Senator John Kerry mentioned during his visit to Gaza. Many of the containers of aid are sitting in cargo trucks but because of strict Israeli blockades, Palestinians in Gaza often cannot even access to US funded aid that awaits them just at the border.

The United States is a party to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. All countries that are party to the Convention or its Protocol are obliged to consider claims for refuge without discrimination. The US provides world leadership on refugee issues by refusing to discriminate on the basis of nationality, ethnicity or religion when determining who will be admitted as a refugee. Indeed, the goal of the 1980 Refugee Act sought to assure greater equity in the protection of refugees by repealing the previous law's discriminatory treatment of refugees. Contrary to 30 years of extending protection to refugees on the basis of need, the Kyl amendment seeks to discriminate against an entire group based on nationality alone. Any refugee deemed in need of third country resettlement who meets the criteria of the US refugee program and the security protocols of the Department of Homeland Security should have access to our program irrespective of his or her nationality, ethnicity, or religion.

The Obama administration has taken admirable steps to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including dispatching Middle East envoy George Mitchell on the second day of the new administration. US refugee policy should reflect this positive commitment by refusing to discriminate against Palestinian refugees from Gaza, and considering for resettlement any refugee deemed in need who meets the criteria of the US refugee program and security protocols of the Department of Homeland Security, irrespective of his or her nationality, ethnicity, or religion.

Add your name to our letter opposing the Kyl amendment and we'll fax it automatically to your Senators' offices.

Behind Fairy Tale Drawings, Walls Talk of Unspeakable Cruelty

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/arts/design/28wall.html?_r=1
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: February 27, 2009

Also, check out the slide show!

JERUSALEM — He occupies the driver’s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white steeds under his command and a sly smile across his lips. Bruno Schulz looks out at the world from his painting as if he owns it. But like much else in his life, cut short by a Nazi bullet, this is pure fantasy.

The work and story of Schulz, a Jewish writer and painter in Poland who was forced to illustrate a children’s playroom in a Nazi officer’s home and then killed, have long attracted literary attention. There was something about his humility, talent and fate that captivated writers like Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and David Grossman, who all made him a character in their works.

Yet until the wall drawings for children were discovered in 2001 by a documentary filmmaker, fading and peeling like ancient Roman frescoes, they were thought to have been destroyed. Spirited out of Schulz’s hometown in what is now Ukraine under contested circumstances by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel, they have been painstakingly preserved and put on view here for the first time.

And while this haunting show, a permanent exhibition titled “Wall Painting Under Coercion,” will not end the lingering controversy over whether Schulz belongs more to Polish than to Jewish culture, or whether the wall drawings should have remained in Ukraine rather than go to Israel, it offers a poignant example of artistic defiance in the face of overwhelming cruelty.

“There was something very Kafkaesque about his abhorrence of bureaucracy and authority,” said Yehudit Shendar, senior art curator at Yad Vashem. “He is sometimes called the Polish Kafka. He took courage with a brush in his hand. It became a weapon of rebellion.”

For example, the Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Hansel and Gretel that Schulz created for the officer’s children’s playroom bore the faces of real people: Schulz himself, his father and other members of the Jewish population in their town, Drohobych. Putting himself at the reins in his drawing struck a note of defiance, since Nazi law forbade Jews from riding in or driving carriages.

His face is also that of the witch, a reference, curators believe, to the witch hunts that Jews faced in eastern Galicia, then part of Poland, in those months after the Nazi conquest of his town in June 1941.

Instantly, some 900 Jews were rounded up and shot. Most of the rest were pressed into forced labor before being killed. Schulz was a sickly man and a talented one, and the Gestapo sergeant in charge of Jewish laborers, Felix Landau, held him aside and ordered him to decorate a riding school and his children’s nursery. It seemed to be his salvation.

Marila B., who was 11 at the time and lived in the house next to the riding school, eventually escaped through the forest with her family and lives today in Israel. She remembers the Nazi sergeant and the wall drawings because she was ordered to baby-sit for the officer’s children, aged 4 and 2.

“I would play with the children in the garden and then take them up to the playroom, and there I saw the drawings,” she said in a brief interview at the opening of the exhibition at Yad Vashem this month. Loath to be obliged to repeat her story, she asked that her full name not be published. “Landau used to walk around with a pistol in one hand and a whip in the other. He was the very embodiment of evil.”

Landau did save Schulz for more than a year, until November 1942, by providing him with work and the means for minimal sustenance. Schulz, whose literary reputation as a short-story writer had already been established, had obtained false Aryan papers and was about to escape when another Gestapo sergeant, Karl Günter, angry that Landau had killed his Jewish dentist, put a bullet in Schulz’s head. He is said to have told Landau: “You killed my Jew. Now I’ve killed yours.”

Schulz was 50 and a bachelor, and though he had published only a handful of works, he was viewed as brilliant by those who mattered most in Polish literature. His reputation later grew immensely. As Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, “What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.”

Always rooted in Drohobych, his work had a magical vitality to it.

As one of his famous lines reads, “My colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.”

Mr. Grossman, the Israeli author, says he discovered Schulz when someone told him that Schulz’s influence was evident in his own first novel. He had never heard of Schulz, but he picked up his stories and felt a chill of admiration and recognition. Upon learning of the infamous line about Nazis’ killing each other’s Jews, Mr. Grossman was filled with the ambition to write about the Holocaust.

In his widely admired novel “See Under: Love,” a character named Bruno escapes a ghetto under Nazi occupation and jumps into a river, joining a school of salmon.

Most of Schulz’s artwork has not survived but was also esteemed by his contemporaries. Expressionist in the way of Middle European artists of the interwar era, it mixed dreamlike fantasy with a touch of erotica. Because he was an assimilated Jew who wrote in Polish and whose hometown is now in Ukraine, the discovery of the murals was greeted in Eastern Europe as the retrieval of a piece of national heritage.

For officials at Yad Vashem, however, Schulz was killed for being a Jew, and his work belonged here. When they learned of the discovery, they negotiated with the family living in the house and the municipality to get permission to rescue the paintings from their neglected circumstances.

What happened next is disputed, but most of the paintings were removed and taken to Israel without the Ukrainian government’s permission. After years of bad feelings, a deal has been struck whereby the murals belong to Ukraine but are on long-term loan to Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian deputy culture minister attended the exhibition’s opening.

So did Mr. Grossman. He told the audience an anecdote from Schulz’s childhood. His mother caught him feeding sugar water to flies one autumn day, and she asked him what he was doing. “Helping them get through the long winter,” he replied.

That, Mr. Grossman said, is what Schulz’s work does for us all.

Pope Condemns Holocaust Denial

By REUTERS
Published: February 12, 2009
Filed at 7:31 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/02/12/world/international-us-pope-jews-holocaust.html?hp

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, trying to defuse a controversy over a bishop who denies the Holocaust, said Thursday "any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable," especially if it comes from a clergyman.

The pope also confirmed for the first time that he was planning to visit Israel. Vatican sources say the trip is expected for May. It would be the first by a pope since John Paul visited in 2000.

Benedict made the comments in his first meeting with Jews since the controversy over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson began in late January. Williamson denies the full extent of the Holocaust and says there were no gas chambers.

The pope told Jewish leaders: "The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah (Holocaust) was a crime against humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures ..."

The German pope recalled his own visit to the death camp at Auschwitz in 2006 and, in some of the strongest words he has ever spoken about the Holocaust and relations with Jews, said:

"It is my fervent prayer that the memory of this appalling crime will strengthen our determination to heal the wounds that for too long have sullied relations between Christians and Jews."

PRAYER FOR FORGIVENESS

He repeated the prayer that the late Pope John Paul used when he visited Jerusalem's Western Wall in 2000 and asked forgiveness from Jews for Christians who had persecuted them in past centuries.

Benedict then added in his own words: "I now make his prayer my own."

Catholic-Jewish relations have been extremely tense since January 24, when Benedict lifted excommunications of four renegade traditionalist bishops in an attempt to heal a schism that began in 1988 when they were ordained without Vatican permission.

Williamson, a member of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), told Swedish television in an interview broadcast on January 21: "I believe there were no gas chambers."

He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by most historians.

The Vatican has ordered him to recant but he so far has not done so, saying he needs more time to review the evidence.

"This terrible chapter in our history (the Holocaust) must never be forgotten," the Pope told the Jewish delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

In his address to the pope, Rabbi Arther Schneier, who hosted the pontiff at his synagogue in New York last year, emotionally told the pontiff:

"As a Holocaust survivor, these have been painful and difficult days, when confronted with Holocaust-denial by no less than a bishop of the Society of St Pius X ....

"Victims of the Holocaust have not given us the right to forgive the perpetrators nor the Holocaust deniers. Thank you for understanding our pain and anguish ..."

Both the pope and Schneier expressed the hope that dialogue between Catholics and Jews could emerge from the crisis even stronger.

While the excommunications of the traditionalist bishops have been lifted, they and members of the SSPX will not be fully readmitted to the Church until they formally accept the teachings of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council.

One of that historic gathering's key documents was a declaration called "Nostra Aetate" (In Our Times). It repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and urged dialogue with other religions.

(Editing by Diana Abdallah)

U.S. Bombs Used in Raid Against Gaza Strip

Hours before Israel announced a ceasefire, an Amnesty International fact finding mission gained access to Gaza. Their initial reports are disturbing: the team found first hand evidence of war crimes, serious violations of international law and possible crimes against humanity by all parties to the conflict.

AI researchers continue investigating attacks against southern Israel and are currently documenting the true scale of devastation wrought on civilians in Gaza. The stories they report are harrowing.

In the early afternoon of January 4th, three young paramedics walked through a field on a rescue mission to save a group of wounded men in a nearby orchard. A 12-year-old boy, standing by his house, assisted the operation by pointing to where the men could be found. An Israeli air strike on the area killed all four.

The bodies of the four victims could not be retrieved for two days. Ambulance crews who tried to approach the site came under fire from Israeli forces.

Our researchers later traveled to the scene of the strike with the two ambulance drivers who witnessed the attack. They met with the boy’s distraught mother and found the remains of the missile. The label of the missile read, “guided missile, surface attack” and cited the United States as the country of origin.

This is just one of many similar stories.

Under the Geneva Conventions, medical personnel searching, collecting, transporting or treating the wounded must be protected and respected in all circumstances. Clearly, this was not the case on Jan. 4th.

Since we last communicated with you, more than 87,000 of you have written Congress and former administration officials. These emails, along with the massive outpouring of letters from around the world from other Amnesty sections, are making an impact. Just this week:
~The United Nations pledged $613 million in aid for Gaza
~60 members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary of Clinton ~Calling for humanitarian support for Gaza
~And hours ago, the US pledged $20 million in aid1-2

We have a small window of opportunity to build on this momentum: urge Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Susan Rice to push for a full-fledged independent investigation.

This investigation is critical for many reasons, not the least of which is the clear evidence of the use of white phosphorous, as well as the mounting evidence of the misuse of US arms3. As you read this, Amnesty researchers continue documenting the use of arms, and we expect an action specifically calling on Congress to investigate the misuse of US weapons in this conflict in the coming weeks.

Everyone is responsible for the protection of international law. The US government must not turn a blind eye to possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. It should support an independent international inquiry by the United Nations into allegations of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law - by all groups participating in the conflict.

The story of the paramedics and the young boy is not an anomaly. Write Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Rice today and urge accountability for abuses in Gaza and southern Israel now.

Thank you for your continuing support,

Zahir Janmohamed
Advocacy Director
Middle East and North Africa

P.S. For comprehensive information on the conflict, go to www.amnestyusa.org/gaza. For late breaking updates, visit our blog, Human Rights Now. For organizing resources on the conflict, visit the Gaza Resources page.

Obama Signals New Tone in Relations With Islamic World

January 28, 2009
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/world/middleeast/28arabiya.html?_r=1&hp
PARIS — In an interview with one of the Middle East’s major broadcasters, President Barack Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic world, saying he wanted to persuade Muslims that “the Americans are not your enemy.” He also said “the moment is ripe” for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The interview with Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel based in Dubai, signaled a shift — in style and manner at least — from the Bush administration, offering what he depicted as a new readiness to listen rather than dictate.

It was Mr. Obama’s first televised interview from the White House and the first with any foreign news outlet.

In a transcript published on Al Arabiya’s English language Web site, Mr. Obama said it is his job “to communicate to the Muslim world that the Americans are not your enemy.”

He added that “we sometimes make mistakes,” but said that America was not born as a colonial power and that he hoped for a restoration of “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

Mr. Obama spoke as his special Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt to begin an eight-day tour that will include stops in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France and Britain. In Egypt, Mr. Mitchell planned to meet President Hosni Mubarak.

In discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Obama told Al Arabiya that “the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away.” He said that he told Mr. Mitchell to “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

“Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that, instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.”

Several hours after he spoke on Monday night, an explosion on the Israel-Gaza border killed an Israeli soldier and threatened new violence. The war in Gaza, which lasted three weeks, had stopped 10 days ago when both sides declared unilateral cease fires.

Mr. Obama said Israel “will not stop being a strong ally of the United States and I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.”

He also said that although he would not put a time frame on it, he believed it was “possible for us to see a Palestinian state.” He described the state as one “that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life.”

But he also said the Israel-Palestine conflict should not be seen in isolation. “I do think it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Obama said.

He spoke at length about America’s future relationship with the Muslim world, saying his “job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”

He drew a distinction between “extremist organizations” committed to violence and “people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop.”

“We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down,” he said. “But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”

He also said it was “important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress.”

“As I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” he said.

He was not asked whether he would continue the policy of former President George Bush in refusing to exclude military action in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Israel Continues Gaza Withdrawal as Cease-Fire Holds

January 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/world/middleeast/20mideast.html
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — Israeli troops and tanks continued to leave Gaza on Monday as a fragile cease-fire opened the way for intensified international efforts to build a more durable peace.

Small skirmishes broke out on Sunday but Gaza was largely quiet after Israel, then Hamas, announced unilateral cease-fires, ending a devastating 22-day battle in which more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. Some news reports said Israeli forces planned to complete their withdrawal in time for the inauguration on Tuesday of Barack Obama as president of the United States.

But an Israeli military spokesman, speaking in return for customary anonymity, said there was “no official basis for that report but there’s a gradual thinning of troops going on.” He declined to discuss the timetable for the withdrawal to be completed. In Gaza, residents said police officers had returned to their posts and there had been no apparent renewal of hostilities.

European and Arab leaders met in Egypt, where they pledged support for rebuilding Gaza, and called for an end to arms smuggling, as Israel has demanded, and the opening of Gaza’s borders, as demanded by Hamas, the Islamic militant movement that rules Gaza.

Six European leaders went on to Jerusalem, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told them that Israel was interested in leaving Gaza “as quickly as possible,” as soon as the circumstances allowed. A military official confirmed on Sunday evening that a “gradual withdrawal” was under way.

When it embarked on the campaign, Israel said its main military objective was to significantly reduce the Hamas rocket fire out of Gaza and to fundamentally change the security situation in Israel’s south. The results so far seem inconclusive.

Palestinian militants in Gaza fired at least 19 rockets at southern Israel on Sunday, including some after Hamas and other militant groups had declared the cease-fire. Most landed without causing injury, but one struck a house in the Israeli port city of Ashdod, lightly wounding one woman, the military said.

Israel said it carried out three air strikes in Gaza on Sunday, one against a group of gunmen who opened fire on its forces and two against rocket-launching squads. There were conflicting reports of casualties, with either one man or one girl said to have been killed.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, cited a Gaza resident who had said that his brother, a farmer, was killed by Israeli fire.

In a speech broadcast Sunday night on Hamas’s Al Aqsa television, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, who has been in hiding for the past three weeks, claimed victory against Israel. He pledged to provide compensation to families who suffered damage during the war.

On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s senior exiled leader, in Damascus to tell him that: "Today is the beginning of victory and perseverance will complete the links of victory,” the Iranian IRNA news agency reported.

Gaza health officials increased the Palestinian death toll on Sunday to about 1,300 people, including 104 women and 410 children. The number is expected to rise as more bodies are found.

Israel’s cease-fire took effect early Sunday. About 12 hours later, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza announced their immediate, weeklong cease-fire.

Hamas and its associates gave Israeli troops a week to leave the coastal enclave. Hamas had previously said it would continue fighting as long as Israeli forces remained.

Referring to the one-week deadline, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Olmert, said Israel did not “take dictates from Hamas.” But he also insisted that Israel, which began an air offensive against Hamas on Dec. 27 and sent ground forces in a week later, had no desire to stay in Gaza for long. “If it is quiet, it will be easier for us to leave expeditiously,” he said.

Israeli military and political leaders have emphasized that Israel will respond to any attacks, but on Sunday the guns largely gave way to diplomacy.

Hamas demands the opening of the Gaza border crossings as a condition for a lasting truce. Israel’s primary condition is an internationally guaranteed mechanism to prevent weapons smuggling across Egypt’s border into Gaza.

At a summit meeting at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik on Sunday, European and moderate Arab leaders offered their support for both goals. “We are ready to offer technical, diplomatic, military and marine assistance to Israel and Egypt to stop the smuggling of weapons,” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said at a news conference after the meeting.

Egypt also hopes to force Hamas into reconciliation talks with its rival, Fatah, as a means of unifying the Palestinian leadership and eventually returning Gaza to more moderate Palestinian Authority rule. Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, routing the Fatah forces loyal to the authority.

Hamas, which is classified by Israel, the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization, has been severely battered by the Israeli military operation in Gaza but remains in control.

From Sharm el Sheik, the French, British, German, Spanish, Italian and Czech leaders traveled to Jerusalem for dinner with Mr. Olmert, who told his guests that undermining Hamas rule in Gaza depended on strengthening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, whose power is currently confined to the West Bank.

On Sunday, France also sent four planes carrying medical supplies, water treatment equipment and 80 aid workers including surgeons, doctors and bomb disposal experts to Egypt, the French Foreign Ministry said. The equipment and personnel were on standby on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border, ready to enter as soon as they could.

Meanwhile, competition for control of the reconstruction of Gaza seems to have begun.

Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, complained that European leaders and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, had proposed setting up an interim international committee to finance and organize the reconstruction. Such a committee would cut out Hamas, but it would also bypass the authority.

Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon,, and Ethan Bronner from Gaza City.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Hamas Defiant as Israeli Forces Push Into Gaza City

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/world/middleeast/13mideast.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig
January 13, 2009
By STEVEN ERLANGER and ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — Israeli ground forces called in a series of air strikes as fierce fighting continued in Gaza on Monday, the 17th day of Israel’s war against Hamas.

On Sunday, Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south, and senior Israeli officials said for the first time in the war that they believed that the Hamas military wing was beginning to crack and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza were “eager” for a cease-fire.

Hamas leaders in Gaza, however, said Monday that the organization would continue to fight until the siege was ended and the crossings to Israel and Egypt were reopened. News agencies reported Monday that militants fired as many as 10 missiles out of Gaza into southern Israel, causing no casualties.

"We confirm to our people that victory is closer than ever," the Hamas cabinet in Gaza said in a statement distributed to journalists, according to a Reuters translation.

The Israeli military said that warplanes attacked five Hamas operatives along with weapons caches, tunnels and other targets, while Israeli gunboats fired from the sea. By midday, the Israeli military said its warplanes had struck 25 targets, including, it said, a mosque where Hamas stored rockets and mortars.

During a three-hour lull in fighting on Monday, the military said 165 truckloads of aid had been allowed into Gaza.

Egypt allowed at least two delegations into Gaza from its Rafah border crossing on Monday, relenting on a policy of blocking aid to the area, because of its relationship with Israel. A group of 38 Arab doctors passed through, after being held at the border for four days, and made their way to hospitals to help treat the thousands of wounded. Also, a group of European diplomats entered, returning later in the day.

Overnight, the Israeli military said, its warplanes carried out fewer strikes than on some previous nights.

Israel is facing intensifying accusations from around the world that its offensive is disproportionate to the damage caused by Hamas rocket fire into Israel, and that it has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The Gaza medical authorities are reporting 908 deaths, including at least 380 civilians. The Israeli military says it has killed at least several hundred Hamas fighters. Hamas has said it is not taking its wounded to public hospitals.

Thirteen Israelis have been killed, Israel has said.

Growing numbers of Palestinians are reporting being injured from burns by a phosphorous-type gas used by Israel to obscure its moves from Hamas fighters and render their infrared detectors useless. The substance is legal under international law, but its use is discouraged by Human Rights Watch, whose ballistics expert Mark Garlasco, said causes fires and serious burns in crowded civilian areas.

In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council broadly condemned Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, saying it “resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people.” The council voted 33 to 1 for the resolution, with Canada the only opposing vote. The United States is not a member.

President Bush, a strong supporter of Israel, said Monday at his final White House news conference that the solution to ending the war in Gaza was for Hamas to “stop firing rockets into Israel.”

“There will not be a sustainable cease-fire if they continue firing rockets,” he said in response to a question. “Israel has a right to defend herself.”

Israel has remained unwavering in pressing its campaign. On Sunday, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the nation that Israel was “getting close to achieving the goals it set for itself,” but that “more patience, determination and effort are still demanded.”

Mr. Olmert was speaking in the public part of the regular weekly cabinet meeting, and his words were broadcast to an Israeli populace that supports the war against Hamas in Gaza but is nervous about how and when it will end.

Mr. Olmert gave no time frame, but said Israel “must not miss out, at the last moment, on what has been achieved through an unprecedented national effort.”

Israeli officials also said Sunday that the military had been sending reserve units into Gaza since Thursday. They did not specify the number of reservists.

The announcement that additional forces had joined the fight in Gaza appeared aimed at adding pressure on Hamas, and raised the possibility of an expansion in the conflict, which began Dec. 27.

Cease-fire discussions were held on Monday in Cairo, where Hamas leaders met over the weekend with Egypt’s intelligence service chief, Omar Suleiman. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and now an international envoy to the Palestinians, met with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, following talks with Israeli leaders on Sunday.

But a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official who was to arrive in Cairo on Monday, Amos Gilad, postponed his trip, in a sign a truce was not on the immediate horizon.

Hamas officials who were in Cairo traveled to Damascus, where the group’s political director, Khaled Meshal, lives in exile. They were due to return Monday evening to continue talks, a Mubarak spokesman for told Bloomberg.

The Israeli cabinet secretary, Oved Yehezkel, told reporters that in the Sunday cabinet meeting the heads of army intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, and of the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, said, “It is the inclination within Hamas to agree to a cease-fire, given the harsh blow it received and given the absence of accomplishment on the ground.”

The Israelis said this view inside Gaza was a contrast to the “unyielding stands” of Mr. Meshal. But Hamas “is not expected to wave a white flag” and is reserving rockets and weaponry to fire at the end of the conflict, the intelligence chiefs said.

Another senior Israeli security official said that Israeli soldiers had “confirmed through their sights” the killing of 300 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters on the ground in Gaza, and that Hamas units were making mistakes and fighting without clear direction.

“I can say with a high level of confidence that for two days, what we have been hearing repeatedly is that Hamas inside Gaza is eager — eager — to achieve a cease-fire,” said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s delicate nature. “This is as opposed to the leadership in Damascus that is willing to fight to the last Palestinian.”

The Israelis were clearly all pushing a concerted message, but no official provided details on how Israel supported its assertion. It was impossible to get a response from Hamas leaders in Gaza, because they were in hiding from Israeli military strikes.

On Saturday, Mr. Meshal said in Damascus that Hamas would not consider a cease-fire until Israel ended the assault and opened all crossings into Gaza. He said that the ferocity of the Israeli campaign had crossed the line and called it a “holocaust,” adding, “You have destroyed the last chance for negotiations.”

Israel and the United States are trying to secure agreement on a deal brokered by Egypt that would mean a Hamas commitment to stop all rocket firing into Israel and an Egyptian commitment to block smuggling tunnels into Gaza, to stop the resupplying of Hamas with weaponry and cash. In return, Israel would agree to a cease-fire and the opening of its crossings into Gaza for goods and fuel and the opening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, with European Union supervision.

If the Egyptian effort fails, Israeli officials said, the military is likely to go to a “third stage” of the war against Hamas in Gaza, with the reserve troops thrown into the battle.

An expansion of the war would most likely mean Israeli troops moving into southern Gaza, to take a strip of land at least 500 yards wide inside Gaza at the Egyptian border. Israel has been bombing the area to try to destroy smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.

Mr. Olmert and his two top cabinet ministers, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, were reported to disagree about the best way to win the war and consolidate Israeli gains. But they are under pressure from the army to decide on whether to expand the war or end it, in part because the soldiers become easier targets unless they are constantly moving.

There was a new development on Sunday in the investigation into one of the deadliest attacks so far — an Israeli mortar strike near a United Nations school on Tuesday that killed up to 43 Palestinians. The newspaper Haaretz reported that a military investigation had concluded that two Israeli shells hit a Hamas mortar unit that had fired first, but that an errant Israeli shell hit near the school.

The army later rebutted the article, saying its initial inquiry showed “mortars were fired from within the school” at Israeli forces nearby, “and those forces returned fire.”

United Nations officials have denied that any Palestinian fighters were in the school grounds and called for an independent international investigation, and the army had earlier gone back and forth about whether the Hamas mortars were fired within the school or near it.

Steven Erlanger and Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem. Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza City, Sabrina Tavernise from Jerusalem. and Alan Cowell from London.

Red Cross Reports Grisly Find in Gaza

Israel Accused of Blocking Aid to Wounded
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/08/AR2009010800842.html?nav=igoogle
By Craig Whitlock and Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 8, 2009; 8:14 AM

JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 -- The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children -- emaciated but alive -- in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

Israel's offensive against militants in Gaza continued with intense bombing in the southern part of the territory, near the border with Egypt. There was also a brief exchange of fire across Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

In the Lebanon incident, militants in the southern part of that country lobbed several rockets into Israeli territory, and the Israeli military responded with fire of its own. Though the exchange harkened to the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese-based militant group Hezbollah, Lebanese officials promptly condemned the fire from their side and said they were taking steps to more closely patrol the area.

Lebanese information minister Tareq Mitri released a statement saying that the government had been assured by Hezbollah -- which serves as a political party in the Lebanese government and is particularly influential in the southern part of the country -- that it was not responsible for the Katyusha rockets that landed near the Israeli town of Nahariya. Only minor injuries were reported.

The Israeli strikes in southern Gaza were focused on the area around Rafah, a border crossing town that is also the site of a network of smuggling tunnels used by the militant group Hamas.

Under an agreement announced on Wednesday, Israel was to pause attacks beginning at 1 p.m. local time so that Gaza residents could emerge for food and other basic supplies.

But humanitarian criticism of the ongoing operation intensified after the Red Cross announced its discovery of several underfed children in a house with a number of dead adults.

Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances to the area, located in Zaytoun, a neighborhood south of Gaza City. They said the Israeli military did not grant permission until Wednesday afternoon.

In an unusual public statement issued by its Geneva headquarters, the Red Cross called the episode "unacceptable" and said the Israeli military had "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."

When rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent arrived at the site, they found 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with four young children lying next to their dead mothers, the Red Cross said. The children were too weak to stand and were rushed to a hospital, the agency said.

A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment early Thursday on the specific allegations made by the Red Cross but said in a statement that the military "has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians."

"Any serious allegations made against the IDF's conduct will need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally," the statement added.

The Red Cross said its workers evacuated 18 wounded survivors from the houses in donkey carts. They said ambulances could not reach the site because of earthen barriers erected around the neighborhood by the Israeli military. Red Cross officials said that Israeli soldiers posted nearby tried to chase rescue workers away from the site but that the rescuers refused to leave.

"This is a shocking incident," Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross's head of delegation for Israel and the Palestinian territories, said in a statement. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded."

The Geneva Conventions provide that parties to a conflict "at all times" should "without delay" take "all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." The conventions also say that wounded "shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care."

The Red Cross said it was able to remove only three of the bodies and had received reports of other casualties in the neighborhood. The agency said that it was trying to return to the site but that negotiations with the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage were ongoing.

Palestinian journalists confirmed that large numbers of wounded survivors, including children, had arrived at Red Cross hospitals in Gaza from Zaytoun on Wednesday. Other details could not be independently corroborated; the Israeli military has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza.

There have been other reports of wounded Gazans who have been forced to wait many hours or even days for ambulances since the Israeli offensive began Dec. 27, including several in the Zaytoun neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Israel said Wednesday it was in "fundamental agreement" with a cease-fire proposal offered by Egypt and France, but fighting continued in the Gaza Strip as diplomats from more than a dozen countries haggled over details in a bid to stop the conflict.

Israeli officials said they would send emissaries to Egypt on Thursday to hold talks on a potential truce proposed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Parallel diplomatic efforts were underway in New York at the United Nations. But many sticking points remained. The French-Egyptian proposal calls for an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on securing Gaza's borders and ending an economic blockade that Israel has imposed since June 2007, when Hamas expelled rival Fatah forces from Gaza to seize sole control of the strip.

U.S. officials have supported the French-Egyptian effort but said the basic issues that led to the conflict need to be resolved upfront. "It has to be a cease-fire that will not allow a return to the status quo," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.

Israel has vowed to continue its 12-day military campaign until it is satisfied that Hamas will be unable to rearm itself by smuggling weaponry through cross-border tunnels from Egypt. Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets, most of them crude and unguided, into southern Israel since a six-month truce between the group and Israel expired Dec. 19.

The Netherlands, Denmark and Turkey said Wednesday they would be willing to contribute to an international force that would patrol the Gaza-Egypt border to prevent smuggling. Israeli officials said they wanted to ensure that any such force would have the authority to stop arms trafficking.

Hamas officials, who have been involved separately in negotiations with Egypt, reacted coolly to the cease-fire plan.

Ahmed Youssef, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the group would not stop firing rockets into southern Israel until the Israeli military withdrew from the Palestinian territory and ended the economic blockade, which has left Gaza's 1.5 million people dependent on smugglers and relief organizations for their basic needs. About 25 rockets landed in southern Israel on Wednesday, wounding two people, the Israeli military said.

The Israeli military observed a three-hour cessation in the fighting Wednesday afternoon to allow relief agencies to deliver about 80 truckloads of emergency supplies. The lull in the violence also gave besieged Gaza residents an opportunity to emerge briefly from their homes and seek food, fuel and medical care.

Gazan medical officials said the pause in fighting led to a drop in casualties compared with other days since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday. Twenty-nine Palestinians were reported killed Wednesday, bringing the toll to more than 680 since the fighting began, Palestinian health officials said. U.N. officials estimate that about one-third of those killed have been women and children, including three youngsters killed Wednesday when a shell struck a car.

Seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians have died in the conflict. Four of the soldiers were killed by errant shells fired by Israeli forces.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

Rockets Fired From Lebanon Into Israel

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: January 8, 2009
JERUSALEM — Rockets fired from Lebanon landed in northern Israel on Thursday, raising concerns they could represent a broadening of the conflict, but both governments played down their significance. International efforts to end the 13-day war in the Gaza Strip continued with the arrival of Israeli negotiators in Cairo.

Israeli shells hit Jabaliya. A Hamas rocket struck Gadera. More Photos »
Egyptian officials said the Israeli officials were meeting with the head of Egyptian military intelligence, Omar Suleiman, to explore a proposal devised by Egypt and France as what officials in Paris called a road map to a cease-fire. There was no immediate word on the outcome of the talks.

As Israel’s offensive in Gaza continued with tanks on the ground in the beleaguered coastal strip and bombardment from the air, Israel again ordered a temporary lull in the fighting on Thursday to give the 1.5 million population a three-hour opportunity to seek medical help and buy supplies.

A similar pause yesterday enabled rescue teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter some areas for the first time since Israel’s ground offensive began last weekend after days of air-strikes. In one area, the Committee reported Thursday, its representatives discovered “shocking” scenes including four children next to their mother’s corpses. The children were too weak to stand on their own, the aid organization said.

The discussions in Cairo got underway hours after at least three missiles from Lebanon landed near the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, slightly injuring two Israelis, and the Israeli army responded with fire. The rockets from Lebanon raised concern that they could presage a second front in the conflict that would complicate peace efforts and revive memories of the bloody war between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006.

But the Israeli Army later dismissed the rockets on Thursday as “a minor event” and, in Lebanon, the government said Hezbollah had distanced itself from the attack. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon immediately condemned the rocket-fire. In a statement, Lebanese Information Minister Tarek Mitri said: “Hezbollah assured the Lebanese government that it remains engaged in preserving the stability in Lebanon and respects Security Council resolution 1701.”

United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 laid out the terms of the ceasefire that ended the war between Israel and Lebanon in August 2006.

The Israeli Army said it “responded with fire against the source of the rockets,” which landed near the town of Nahariya. Two Israelis were slightly wounded, the police said.

The rockets from Lebanon fell in residential areas. Shimon Koren, head of the northern district police, instructed residents of Nahariya and Kabri to enter bomb shelters and he instructed residents in nearby localities to open their shelters. School was canceled in Nahariya and nearby Shlomi.

So far there has been no claim of responsibility.

The lull Thursday coincided with news from Cairo that the Israeli delegation had arrived to open talks. Israeli officials said on Wednesday that their country would be represented at the Cairo talks by two officials — a senior aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shalom Turgeman, and a senior defense official, Amos Gilad.

International pressure for a negotiated cease-fire intensified after Israeli shells killed some 40 people at a United Nations school in Gaza on Tuesday. Israel said Hamas militants had fired mortar shells from the school compound prior to Israel’s shelling.

The Israeli government said Wednesday that it welcomed the efforts of France and Egypt to work out a durable cease-fire. It said it would end its assault if Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel and ended the smuggling of weapons from Egypt. It said that if a durable cease-fire took hold, it would reopen border crossings into Gaza for goods and people. But Israeli and Hamas officials both denied an assertion on Wednesday by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that a cease-fire had been agreed upon.

“There is an agreement on general principles, that Hamas should stop rocket fire and mustn’t rearm,” a senior Israeli official said Wednesday evening. “But that’s like agreeing that motherhood is a good thing. We have to transform those agreed principles into working procedures on the ground, and that’s barely begun.”

The United States has been involved behind the scenes, senior Israeli and French officials said, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “constantly on the phone” with Mr. Olmert, according to one Israeli official.

In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, said of talks about a cease-fire: “As I understand, the Israelis are open to the concept, but they want to learn more about the details; so do we.”

At the United Nations, several Arab delegates said Wednesday night that they thought they now had enough votes to approve a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. That would likely put the United States and other Western powers, which oppose a binding resolution, in the awkward position of having to veto a cease-fire.

A senior French official in Paris said that Mr. Sarkozy’s earlier comment about an agreement on a cease-fire was misunderstood: “The plan is not a cease-fire; the plan is a road map toward a cease-fire.” One crucial aspect of any deal is how to prevent new smuggling tunnels from being built under Egypt’s border with Gaza.

The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.

Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.

Casualty figures in the Gaza war are hard to verify, but officials at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and the Gazan Ministry of Health said 683 Palestinians had died since the conflict began Dec. 27, including 218 children and 90 women. They said 3,085 had been wounded. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza said 130 children age 16 or under had died. The United Nations estimated a few days ago that a quarter of the dead were civilians.

But Palestinian residents and Israeli officials say that Hamas is tending its own wounded in separate medical centers, not in public hospitals, and that it is difficult to know the number of dead Hamas fighters, many of whom were not wearing uniforms.

Israel says it has killed at least 130 Hamas fighters. Ten Israelis have been killed during the offensive, including three civilians. Most of the seven dead Israeli soldiers were killed in so-called friendly fire.

Thanassis Cambanis contributed reporting from Beirut, and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Alan Cowell and Katrin Bennhold contributed from Paris.

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

January 7, 2009
By ETHAN BRONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07media.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig
JERUSALEM — Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.

And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.

“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah,” said Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.”

The government-commissioned investigation into the war with Hezbollah reported that the army had found that when reporters were allowed on the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.

Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, “If a journalist gets injured or killed, then it is Central Command’s responsibility.” She said the government was trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and “not deal with the media.”

Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said, “Any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that.”

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. Unable to send foreign reporters into Gaza, the international news media have relied on Palestinian journalists based there for coverage.

But it seems that many Israelis accept Mr. Seaman’s assessment and shed no tears over the restrictions, despite repeated protests by the Foreign Press Association of Israel, including on Tuesday.

A headline in Tuesday’s issue of Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest selling daily newspaper, expressed well the popular view of the issue. Over a news article describing the generally negative coverage so far, especially in the European media, an intentional misspelling of a Hebrew word turned the headline “World Media” into “World Liars.”

This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli news media whose articles have been filled with “feelings of self-righteousness and a sense of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face of attacks by the enemy,” according to a study of the first days of media coverage of the war by a liberal but nonpartisan group called Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.

The Foreign Press Association has been fighting for weeks to get its members into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately taking its case to the country’s highest court. Last week the justices worked out an arrangement with the organization whereby small groups would be permitted into Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to be opened for other reasons.

So far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been permitted to go in.

On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, “The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world’s media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs.”

At the same time that reporters have been given less access to Gaza, the government has created a new structure for shaping its public message, ensuring that spokesmen of the major government branches meet daily to make sure all are singing from the same sheet.

“We are trying to coordinate everything that has to do with the image and content of what we are doing and to make sure that whoever goes on the air, whether a minister or professor or ex-ambassador, knows what he is saying,” said Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media in the Foreign Ministry. “We have talking points and we try to disseminate our ideas and message.”

Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story: an American-backed country with awesome military machine fighting a third-world guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.

Israelis and their supporters think that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening — years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered, and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.

There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict, of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the news media far away from the death.

John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, entered Gaza on Monday as journalists were kept out. He told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy was a problem.

“For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in,” he said.

Israel Hits U.N.-Run School in Gaza

40 Die at Shelter That Military Says Hamas Was Firing From

By Griff Witte and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/06/AR2009010603504.html?sid%3DST20090107http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/contenhttp://www.washingtonpost.com:80/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register&sub=AR


JERUSALEM, Jan. 6 -- Israeli soldiers battling Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday fired mortar shells at a U.N.-run school where Palestinians had sought refuge from the fighting, killing at least 40 people, many of them civilians, Palestinian medical officials said.

The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation.

"We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza," said John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.

The incident -- one of the single most deadly during Israel's 11-day offensive -- underscored the dangers Palestinian civilians face as thousands of Israeli soldiers fight their way across Gaza against an enemy that does not wear uniforms or operate from bases, but instead mingles with the population.

In all, at least 85 Palestinians died in attacks across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, said Mowaiya Hassanien, a senior Gaza hospital official. He said the Palestinian death toll since the start of Israel's massive military campaign stood at 625, with more than 2,900 injured. The United Nations says 30 percent of those killed have been women and children.

Tuesday's attack on the school came only hours after an Israeli missile struck a residential area in al-Bureij refugee camp, injuring seven U.N. workers in a nearby medical clinic, U.N. officials said. Late Monday, an Israeli airstrike on a U.N. school in Gaza City had killed three members of a family.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks "totally unacceptable."

"After earlier strikes, the Israeli government was warned that its operations were endangering U.N. compounds," he said in a statement. "I am deeply dismayed that despite these repeated efforts, today's tragedies have ensued."

Since the fighting began, the United Nations has opened 23 of its schools as emergency shelters for the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are unable to leave the territory. By Tuesday night, the number of displaced Palestinians flooding into the schools had reached 15,000.

Ging, the U.N. official in Gaza, said that all U.N. facilities are clearly marked with flags and that the Israeli military has been given precise Global Positioning System coordinates.

Using unusually strong language for a body known for quiet diplomacy, Ging declared Tuesday that both Israeli and Hamas leaders, as well as the international community, are to blame for the mounting civilian death toll.

"The political leaders who are responsible on both sides have to call a halt," Ging said. "The civilian population is paying a horrific price. We need this right now. Not tomorrow. The civilians in Gaza have international rights to be protected not by verbal protection, but actual protection."

Both Hamas and Israel have rejected calls for a truce.

Speaking in Washington, President-elect Barack Obama commented for the first time on the Israeli offensive, saying that "the loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I'll have plenty to say about the issue."

The comments contrasted with statements from the Bush administration, which has focused its public remarks on condemning Hamas's role in initiating the violence. Bush has said that only after Hamas has stopped firing rockets should Israel be required to halt its military campaign.

Rockets continued to be launched from the strip Tuesday, with 35 landing in Israel, the military said. A 3-month-old child in Gedera, about 25 miles north of Gaza, was lightly wounded.

Israeli officials blamed Hamas, which has run Gaza for the past 18 months, for the deaths at the schools.

"Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Hamas has deliberately abused a U.N. installation," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Israeli military officials said soldiers operating in the area around the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza came under mortar fire and responded by targeting the source: the U.N.-run al-Fakhora School.

"When you're fired at, you have to fight back," said reserve Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal, a military spokesman.

Tal said two known Hamas gunmen were killed in the Israeli strike just outside the school, in addition to members of a mortar squad.

U.N. officials said they did not know whether fighters had been in the school, and wanted the matter investigated.

At the local hospital where dozens of the injured were treated, physician Basam Warda said a large number of the casualties were women and children who had gathered at the school because they considered it a haven from the fighting. At the time of the attack, people were standing outside the gate of the school, where hundreds of families had sought shelter.

"The wounded arrived with multiple fractures, ripped stomachs, amputated limbs," he said. "The bodies were ripped apart."

Warda said many of the wounded had to be placed on the floor and treated there because of a bed shortage. Others were sent to another hospital, in Gaza City. "Some might have died on the way," he said.

Ging called the fighting "the product of political failure" and accused Israel of depriving Palestinians of critically needed infrastructure.

In a report, the U.N. humanitarian office in Gaza said Tuesday that water and sewage systems in the strip were on the verge of collapse because of power outages and that a third of Gaza's residents are completely cut off from running water.

As the sense of crisis in Gaza deepened, Israeli forces battled on both ends of the 40-mile-long strip, and reports from within the territory suggested the military was tightening its grip. Witnesses said that Israel made gains in Khan Younis, in the south, and that there was intense fighting around Gaza City, in the north.

One Israeli soldier was killed Tuesday, bringing to six the total dead since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday night. Of those, four were killed in "friendly fire" incidents.

Three Israeli civilians and a soldier were killed by rocket fire earlier in the campaign.

In his remarks, Obama said he was "not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign. . . . Starting at the beginning of our administration, we're going to engage effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East."

Leading the push for a truce in Gaza is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been visiting Middle Eastern capitals this week, urging an immediate cease-fire.

Sarkozy said the deaths at the school illustrated the need for a nonmilitary solution. "This reinforces my determination for this to end as quickly as possible," Sarkozy told reporters in the southern Lebanese town of At Tiri after learning of the school attack. "Time works against us; that's why we must find a solution."

Sarkozy was also in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday, in a bid to get President Bashar al-Assad to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a truce. Syria and Iran are two of Hamas's biggest backers.

Assad called Israel's offensive "a war crime." But he also urged a cease-fire.

Hamas, which has never recognized Israel, has vowed to fight on. Israel says it will not stop its offensive until it has international guarantees that Hamas can be prevented from continuing to fire rockets.

As Sarkozy visited Egypt late Tuesday, President Hosni Mubarak said he would propose an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on the Israeli blockade of Gaza and on ways of keeping arms from being smuggled into Gaza via Egypt.

Egypt mediated a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel this summer. The expiration of that truce Dec. 19 precipitated the latest round of violence.

In New York, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Olmert had responded to Mubarak's initiative with an offer to open a humanitarian corridor into Gaza but did not say whether Israel would participate in talks with the Palestinians. "We are awaiting the Israeli response and we harbor hope that it will be a positive one," Kouchner said.

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and special correspondents Reyham Abdel Kareem in Gaza City and Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Israel Halts Operations To Allow Aid Shipments

By Craig Whitlock, Griff Witte and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; 9:33 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/07/AR2009010700791.html?nav=igoogle


JERUSALEM, Jan. 7 -- Israel paused its military operations in the Gaza Strip for three hours on Wednesday to allow for deliveries of humanitarian aid, as Israeli leaders said they were considering an Egyptian proposal for a more lasting ceasefire.

The Israeli government said it "views as positive" talks brokered by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. But Israel officials would not confirm a statement issued by Sarkozy Wednesday afternoon in Paris asserting that Israel had agreed to a truce.

Details of the ceasefire proposal were unclear, but Israel has insisted it will not end its 12-day military campaign in Gaza without guarantees that Hamas will stop smuggling rockets and other weapons into the Palestinian territory.

Meantime, the Israeli military prepared to resume operations in Gaza as the three-hour lull in fighting came to a close. Israeli military officials said they agreed to the temporary break to give besieged Gaza residents an opportunity to emerge from their homes to seek food, fuel and other emergency supplies. Israel has allowed some aid deliveries since it began airstrikes Dec. 27 but relief workers said they have been unable to reach much of the population because of heavy fighting.

The opening of "humanitarian corridors" each day is meant to relieve a situation that international aid agencies say has reached crisis proportions.

The militant group Hamas, which is in charge of the Gaza Strip, said it would not launch any missiles during the three-hour pause.

"There will be no missile launching in these three hours," Hamas deputy leader Moussa Abu Marzouk told Dubai-based Al Arabiya television.

Relief agencies have warned of rapidly worsening conditions in Gaza, with most residents lacking electricity and running water, as well as access to emergency medical care. About 625 Palestinians have died since the start of Israel's massive military campaign, with more than 2,900 injured, according to Palestinian health officials. The United Nations says 30 percent of those killed have been women and children.

Seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians have died in the conflict.The World Bank said Wednesday that Gaza faced a "severe public health crisis" due to a lack of potable water and failing sewage systems. It warned that a major sewage reservoir in Beit Lahiya was at risk of collapse.

"Failure of the lake structure would put about 10,000 residents of the surrounding area in danger of drowning and spark a wider environmental and public health disaster," the agency said in a statement.

The Israeli cabinet met Wednesday morning to discuss a ceasefire proposal floated by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Tuesday night. Israeli officials said they were taking the proposal seriously. But they repeated that they would only end their military operation on the condition that Hamas be prevented from smuggling arms and rockets into Gaza from Egypt.

At the same time, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the cabinet was weighing a plan to intensify the ground offensive in Gaza to further weaken Hamas before a possible withdrawal. The newspaper said that most of Israel's military objectives had already been met.

Meanwhile, heavy fighting was reported in the Zeitoun neighborhood east of Gaza City. The Israeli military said it attacked more than 40 targets overnight, including 15 tunnels.

The daily pause in fighting comes a day after Israeli soldiers battling Hamas gunmen fired mortar shells at a U.N.-run school where Palestinians had sought refuge from the fighting. The incident killed at least 40 people, many of them civilians, Palestinian medical officials said.

The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation.

"We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza," said John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.

It was one of the single most deadly attacks during Israel's 11-day offensive and underscored the dangers Palestinian civilians face as thousands of Israeli soldiers fight their way across Gaza against an enemy that does not wear uniforms or operate from bases, but instead mingles with the population.

In all, at least 85 Palestinians died in attacks across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, said Mowaiya Hassanien, a senior Gaza hospital official.

Tuesday's attack on the school came only hours after an Israeli missile struck a residential area in al-Bureij refugee camp, injuring seven U.N. workers in a nearby medical clinic, U.N. officials said. Late Monday, an Israeli airstrike on a U.N. school in Gaza City had killed three members of a family.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks "totally unacceptable."

"After earlier strikes, the Israeli government was warned that its operations were endangering U.N. compounds," he said in a statement. "I am deeply dismayed that despite these repeated efforts, today's tragedies have ensued."

Since the fighting began, the United Nations has opened 23 of its schools as emergency shelters for the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are unable to leave the territory. By Tuesday night, the number of displaced Palestinians flooding into the schools had reached 15,000.

Ging, the U.N. official in Gaza, said that all U.N. facilities are clearly marked with flags and that the Israeli military has been given precise Global Positioning System coordinates.

Using unusually strong language for a body known for quiet diplomacy, Ging declared Tuesday that both Israeli and Hamas leaders, as well as the international community, are to blame for the mounting civilian death toll.

"The political leaders who are responsible on both sides have to call a halt," Ging said. "The civilian population is paying a horrific price. We need this right now. Not tomorrow. The civilians in Gaza have international rights to be protected not by verbal protection, but actual protection."

Both Hamas and Israel have rejected calls for a truce.

Speaking in Washington, President-elect Barack Obama commented for the first time on the Israeli offensive, saying that "the loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I'll have plenty to say about the issue."

The comments contrasted with statements from the Bush administration, which has focused its public remarks on condemning Hamas's role in initiating the violence. Bush has said that only after Hamas has stopped firing rockets should Israel be required to halt its military campaign.

Rockets continued to be launched from the strip Tuesday, with 35 landing in Israel, the military said. A 3-month-old child in Gedera, about 25 miles north of Gaza, was lightly wounded.

Israeli officials blamed Hamas, which has run Gaza for the past 18 months, for the deaths at the schools.

"Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Hamas has deliberately abused a U.N. installation," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Israeli military officials said soldiers operating in the area around the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza came under mortar fire and responded by targeting the source: the U.N.-run al-Fakhora School.

"When you're fired at, you have to fight back," said reserve Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal, a military spokesman.

Tal said two known Hamas gunmen were killed in the Israeli strike just outside the school, in addition to members of a mortar squad.

U.N. officials said they did not know whether fighters had been in the school, and wanted the matter investigated.

At the local hospital where dozens of the injured were treated, physician Basam Warda said a large number of the casualties were women and children who had gathered at the school because they considered it a haven from the fighting. At the time of the attack, people were standing outside the gate of the school, where hundreds of families had sought shelter.

"The wounded arrived with multiple fractures, ripped stomachs, amputated limbs," he said. "The bodies were ripped apart."

Warda said many of the wounded had to be placed on the floor and treated there because of a bed shortage. Others were sent to another hospital, in Gaza City. "Some might have died on the way," he said.

Ging called the fighting "the product of political failure" and accused Israel of depriving Palestinians of critically needed infrastructure.

In a report, the U.N. humanitarian office in Gaza said Tuesday that water and sewage systems in the strip were on the verge of collapse because of power outages and that a third of Gaza's residents are completely cut off from running water.

As the sense of crisis in Gaza deepened, Israeli forces battled on both ends of the 40-mile-long strip, and reports from within the territory suggested the military was tightening its grip. Witnesses said that Israel made gains in Khan Younis, in the south, and that there was intense fighting around Gaza City, in the north.

One Israeli soldier was killed Tuesday, bringing to six the total dead since Israel launched its ground offensive Saturday night. Of those, four were killed in "friendly fire" incidents.

Three Israeli civilians and a soldier were killed by rocket fire earlier in the campaign.

In his remarks, Obama said he was "not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign. . . . Starting at the beginning of our administration, we're going to engage effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East."

Leading the push for a truce in Gaza is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been visiting Middle Eastern capitals this week, urging an immediate cease-fire.

Sarkozy said the deaths at the school illustrated the need for a nonmilitary solution. "This reinforces my determination for this to end as quickly as possible," Sarkozy told reporters in the southern Lebanese town of At Tiri after learning of the school attack. "Time works against us; that's why we must find a solution."

Sarkozy was also in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday, in a bid to get President Bashar al-Assad to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a truce. Syria and Iran are two of Hamas's biggest backers.

Assad called Israel's offensive "a war crime." But he also urged a cease-fire.

Hamas, which has never recognized Israel, has vowed to fight on. Israel says it will not stop its offensive until it has international guarantees that Hamas can be prevented from continuing to fire rockets.

As Sarkozy visited Egypt late Tuesday, President Hosni Mubarak said he would propose an immediate cease-fire, followed by talks on the Israeli blockade of Gaza and on ways of keeping arms from being smuggled into Gaza via Egypt.

Egypt mediated a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel this summer. The expiration of that truce Dec. 19 precipitated the latest round of violence.

In New York, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Olmert had responded to Mubarak's initiative with an offer to open a humanitarian corridor into Gaza but did not say whether Israel would participate in talks with the Palestinians. "We are awaiting the Israeli response and we harbor hope that it will be a positive one," Kouchner said.

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and special correspondents Reyham Abdel Kareem in Gaza City and Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.