Israel Criticized for New Deaths as Cease-Fire Looms in Gaza
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: January 17, 2009
JERUSALEM — Israeli tank fire killed two young brothers sheltering at a United Nations school in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya on Saturday, Palestinian and United Nations officials said, even as Israel prepared to declare a unilateral cease-fire in Gaza.
The deaths brought a new round of sharp condemnation for Israel from the United Nations, including aid officials who raised questions about whether the attack, and others like it, should be investigated as war crimes. The Israeli Army said that it was investigating the reports at the highest level but that initial inquiries indicated that troops were returning fire from near or within the school.
The military said that it struck hundreds of targets overnight, including rocket-launching sites, about 70 smuggling tunnels, and weapons caches, and that its troops tightened the encirclement of Gaza City.
Hamas officials outside Gaza vowed to fight on, regardless of any Israeli cease-fire declaration. The group’s representatives were scheduled to meet Egyptian officials in Cairo who are trying to pull together a lasting truce in this three-week-old war, in which more than 1,200 Palestinians, and 13 Israelis, have died.
Four Israeli soldiers, two of them officers, were seriously hurt by mortar fire in fighting on Saturday morning, the army said. And it said that Hamas had fired 12 rockets at Israel on Saturday, a sharp reduction from daily totals since the start of the war.
Diplomatic officials say that Hamas, which has been battered, is considering a one-year renewable truce, without foreign monitors inside Gaza, on the conditions that all Israeli forces leave the territory within a week and that border crossings between with Israel and Egypt are reopened.
Israel says it wants to keep its forces in place until a detailed arrangement is negotiated that will greatly hinder the ability of Hamas to smuggle weapons, cash and fighters through tunnels into Egypt. The government wants a cease-fire in place until a formal agreement is finished with the Egyptians but has said it will not sign a deal with Hamas itself.
The United States and Israel signed a “memorandum of understanding” on Friday in Washington that calls for expanded cooperation to prevent Hamas from rearming through Egypt. The agreement, which is vague, promises increased American technical assistance and international monitors, presumably to be based in Egypt, to crack down on the smuggling. As important, the United States agreed to work with NATO partners to interdict arms smuggling into Gaza by land and sea from Syria and Iran.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt said that his country would not be bound by the memorandum and would not accept foreign troops on its soil. But officials of both Israel and the United States say that Egypt has been showing a new seriousness about stopping the smuggling.
The Arab and Muslim world again appeared to be split into two camps. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been openly critical of Hamas, pressing it to agree to a cease-fire. Qatar, meanwhile, which is close to Iran, held a meeting with Syria, Iran, Mauritania and Hamas’s exiled political leader, Khaled Meshal, as the Palestinian representative. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, which governs the West Bank and is supported by the United States and Egypt, had refused to go to Qatar.
In Beit Lahiya, some 1,600 displaced Gazans have taken shelter at a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, which cares for Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war and their descendants.
John Ging, the Gaza director of the agency, said that two brothers, ages 5 and 7, were killed about 7 a.m. by Israeli fire at the school. Their mother, who was among 14 others wounded, had her legs blown off.
“These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead,” Mr. Ging said. “The question now being asked is: is this and the killing of all other innocent civilians in Gaza a war crime?”
Christopher Gunness, the refugee agency spokesman, said: “Where you have a direct hit on an Unrwa school where about 1,600 people had taken refuge, where the Israeli Army knows the coordinates and knows who’s there, where this comes as the latest in a catalog of direct and indirect attacks on Unrwa facilities, there have to be investigations to establish whether war crimes have been committed.”
The strike was the fourth time Israel has hit an Unrwa school during the 22-day war on Hamas. On Jan. 6, according to Mr. Ging, 43 people were killed by an Israeli shell that hit a school compound in Jabaliya. Israel has disputed the death toll and said it was returning mortar fire from within the school compound.
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, again called for an immediate cease-fire. “Both sides must stop the fighting now,” he said in an address to the Lebanese Parliament on Saturday. “We cannot wait for all the details, the mechanisms, to be conclusively negotiated and agreed while civilians continue to be traumatized, injured or killed.”
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