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Thursday March 28, 2024

Israel, Palestine agree to a truce

By Agencies
August 08, 2022
This picture taken from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon shows Palestinian rockets fired from the Gaza Strip on August 7, 2022.— JACK GUEZ / AFP
This picture taken from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon shows Palestinian rockets fired from the Gaza Strip on August 7, 2022.— JACK GUEZ / AFP

GAZA CITY: Israel and Palestinian authorities have agreed to a truce in Gaza from Sunday evening as mediated by Cairo, sources said, after a weekend-long pounding of Palestinian targets by Israel triggered longer-range rocket attacks against its cities.

An Egyptian security source said Israel had agreed to the proposal, while a Palestinian official familiar with Egyptian efforts said the ceasefire would go into effect at 20:00 (1700 GMT). The Palestine organisation Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, said they had agreed to a Cairo-brokered ceasefire to end three days of intense conflict with Israel that has left at least 41 Palestinians dead.

“A short while ago the wording of the Egyptian truce agreement was reached, which contains Egypt’s commitment to work towards the release of two prisoners, (Bassem) al-Saadi and (Khalil) Awawdeh,” senior Islamic Jihad member Mohammad al-Hindi said in a statement.

Saadi, a senior figure in Islamic Jihad’s political wing, was recently arrested in the occupied West Bank, while Awawdeh is also in Israeli detention. Gaza’s health ministry announced 10 more deaths late Sunday, among them nine children, raising the toll to 41 since fighting began on Friday.

The ministry said more than 300 people had been wounded in Gaza. Two Israelis have been injured by a shrapnel over the same period, medics reported. An AFP photographer saw two rockets being intercepted in the centre of Israel’s commercial capital Tel Aviv Sunday evening.

Nour Abu Sultan, who lives west of Gaza, said, “We haven’t slept for days (due to) heat and shelling and rockets, the sound of aircraft hovering above us... is terrifying,” the 29-year-old said.

Since Friday, Israel has carried out heavy aerial and artillery bombardment of Islamic Jihad positions in Gaza, with the latter firing hundreds of rockets in retaliation. Buildings have been reduced to rubble in Gaza, while Israelis have been forced to shelter from a barrage of rockets.

Islamic Jihad extended its barrage earlier Sunday to fire two rockets targeting Jerusalem, but they were shot down by the Israeli army. The military has said the entire “senior leadership of the military wing of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza has been neutralised”.

Muhammad Abu Salmiya, director general of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, said medics were treating wounded people in a “very bad condition”, warning of dire shortages of drugs and fuel to run power generators.

“Every minute we receive injured people,” he said earlier Sunday. The Gaza health ministry said 15 children were among the 41 dead. But Israel said it had “irrefutable” evidence that a stray rocket fired by Islamic Jihad was responsible for the deaths of several children in Gaza’s northern Jabalia area on Saturday.

An AFP photographer saw six dead bodies at the hospital there, including three minors. “We came running to the place and found body parts lying on the ground... they were torn-apart children,” said Muhammad Abu Sadaa, describing the devastation in Jabalia.

The army said it had struck 139 Islamic Jihad positions, with the jihadists firing over 600 rockets and mortars, but with more than 100 of those projectiles falling short inside Gaza. Amid the high tensions, Jews in Israel-annexed east Jerusalem marked the Tisha Be’av fasting day Sunday at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, known in Judaism as the Temple Mount. Some Palestinians shouted “God is greatest” in response, and an AFP photographer was briefly detained by Israeli police, but commemorations passed without major incident.