Israel withdrew ground forces from the Gaza Strip yesterday and started a 72-hour ceasefire with Hamas mediated by Egypt as a first step towards negotiations on a more enduring end to the month-old war.
Israeli armour and infantry left Gaza ahead of the truce, with a military spokesman saying their main goal of destroying cross-border infiltration tunnels dug by Islamist militants had been completed.
“Mission accomplished,” the military tweeted.
Troops and tanks will be “redeployed in defensive positions outside the Gaza Strip and we will maintain those defensive positions,” an Israeli army official said.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas, said Israel’s offensive in the densely populated, coastal enclave was a “100% failure.”
Israel sent officials to join talks in Cairo to work out a longer-term deal during the course of the truce. Hamas and Islamic Jihad also sent representatives from Gaza.
In Gaza, where some half-million people have been displaced by a month of bloodshed, some residents, carrying mattresses and with children in tow, left UN shelters to trek back to neighbourhoods where whole blocks have been destroyed by Israeli shelling and the smell of decomposing bodies fills the air.
Sitting on a pile of debris on the edge of the northern town of Beit Lahiya, Zuhair Hjaila, a 33-year-old father of four, said he had lost his house and his supermarket.
“This is complete destruction,” he said. “I never thought I would come back to find an earthquake zone.”
Visiting International Red Cross President Peter Maurer, responding to local criticism that his organisation was late in helping some of the victims, said “we were insufficiently able to bridge the gap between our willingness to protect them and our ability to do so.”
Several previous truce attempts by Egypt and other regional powers, overseen by the United States and United Nations, failed to calm the worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in two years.
Gaza officials say the Israeli offensive had killed 1,867 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians were killed since Israel initiated its offensive on July 8.
Hamas said it had informed Egypt “of its acceptance of a 72-hour period of calm.”
The Palestinian cabinet welcomed the ceasefire. Efforts to turn the ceasefire into a lasting truce could prove difficult, with the sides far apart on their central demands, and each rejecting the other’s legitimacy. Hamas rejects Israel’s existence, and vows to destroy it, while Israel denounces Hamas as a terrorist group and eschews any ties.
Besides the truce, Palestinians demand an end to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on impoverished Gaza and the release of prisoners including those Israel arrested in a June crackdown in the occupied West Bank after three Jewish seminary students were kidnapped and killed. Israel has resisted those demands in the past.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki said there was “clear evidence” of war crimes by Israel during its offensive in Gaza as he met International Criminal Court prosecutors in The Hague yesterday to push for an investigation.