Cease-fire takes hold in Gaza

By Ruth Eglash / The Washington Post

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JERUSALEM — An unofficial cease-fire took hold Wednesday in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel after the worst outbreak of fighting since a 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist group that rules the beleaguered Palestinian enclave.

During a 24-hour flare-up, militant factions in Gaza, including Hamas, fired more than 100 rockets and mortar shells into Israel starting Tuesday and continuing through Wednesday morning. Israeli jets pounded more than 50 military targets belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in response. Israel said some of the rockets fired into its territory were Iranian-made.

Although the Iron Dome defense system downed most of the rockets, one hit a civilian home and another a kindergarten. However, by early Wednesday, spokesmen for Hamas and Islamic Jihad said a cease-fire with Israel had been brokered by Egypt. Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, said “there was a lot of mediation in the past hours.”

He said the factions, including Islamic Jihad, would uphold the cease-fire as long as Israel did the same. Israeli leaders would not confirm an agreement was reached, although local media reported Hamas had received a message that if the rockets from Gaza stopped, Israel’s airstrikes would, too.

In a tense calm apparently holding for the most part Wednesday, some Israeli children went to school in the morning.

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The passage worth keeping is not the Bennett one. In the fifth and sixth columns the Washington Post states, in its own voice: 'Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. But after Hamas wrested control of the strip more than a decade ago, Israel imposed a land and sea blockade on the enclave...

A growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza has pushed its residents to start protesting.

In late March, thousands began weekly protests demanding both a right to return to land that is now inside Israel and a solution to the crisis facing more than 2 million residents.' And then: 'Israeli forces have killed more than 100 people in those protests, including 60 on May 14.' A U.S. paper naming the right of return as the protesters' own demand, and attributing the 2018 killings to Israeli forces without hedging, is rare in this batch. 'Occupied' does not appear; Gaza is 'the beleaguered Palestinian enclave' and 'the strip'.

Cite this clipping

"Cease-fire takes hold in Gaza," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 31 May 2018. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2018-039. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2018-039