JERUSALEM // The Palestinians and Israel agreed to a 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza yesterday, accepting an Egyptian invitation to resume talks to end fighting that has killed more than 2,000 people.
The ceasefire deal, which came into effect at one minute past midnight, ended days of frantic mediation to stem violence that resumed after an earlier truce collapsed on Friday.
The Egyptian foreign ministry called for the ceasefire because of “the necessity to protect innocent blood”.
It called on both sides to use the lull to “reach a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire”.
Israel walked away from talks in Cairo on Friday when Hamas refused to extend an earlier ceasefire and begun firing rockets.
More than a month of fighting in and around Gaza has killed at least 1,939 Palestinians – the majority of which were civilians – and 67 people on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers.
The UN says around a third of the civilian victims were children.
Eight Palestinians were killed yesterday, including a woman and two 17-year-olds, in a barrage of Israeli airstrikes and 10 bodies were pulled from the rubble east of Gaza City.
Throughout the day, Israeli planes hit 41 targets, including a factory in Gaza City used to make cleaning products close to the main hotel where foreign journalists are based.
Militants launched 35 rockets over the border, 23 of which struck southern Israel and eight which were shot down, with the rest falling short inside Palestinian territory.
In Deir Al Balah, a crowd of young men bellowed slogans as they carried the bloodied body of one of the teenagers to its burial side.
The army described the youth as a “prominent terror operative”.
“God loves martyrs! We will march on Jerusalem in our millions,” chanted mourners.
At the graveside, people passed around pieces of shrapnel as he was laid to rest in a plot where several other freshly-dug graves laid open, as if prepared for further deaths.
For days, Egyptian efforts to broker an end to more than a month of fighting led nowhere.
Yesterday’s ceasefire “is one of the ways or tactics to ensure successful negotiations or to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” the Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said from Doha.
The final “goal we insist on is having the demands of Palestinians met and the Gaza Strip exist without a blockade”, he said.
“We insist on this goal. In the case of Israeli procrastination or continued aggression, Hamas is ready with other Palestinian factions to resist on ground and politically and ... to face all possibilities.”
Israel said that if talks to secure a permanent ceasefire led nowhere, going back in to Gaza would be the only option.
“Israel will not engage in negotiations under fire,” prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet yesterday, warning the operation would not stop until there was a prolonged quiet.
In the West Bank, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by Israeli troops as he played outside his home in Al Fawwar refugee camp near the southern city of Hebron, relatives and medics said.
The army said troops had opened fire during a “violent riot” but said it had opened an investigation into the circumstances of the shooting.
Israel’s Gaza operation has triggered a series of almost daily protests across the West Bank, during which 16 Palestinians have been killed, the Ramallah-based health ministry said.
* Agence France-Presse
