End Gaza Offensive: UN Chief

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan shakes hands with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ahead of talks in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday. (AFP)

31, August, 2006

Hisham Abu Taha, Arab News

GAZA CITY, 31 August 2006 — UN chief Kofi Annan demanded an immediate end to the offensive in Gaza as nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops yesterday, taking the toll to more than 200 killed in two months.

Eight people died in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, where Israeli soldiers have been operating since late Saturday in the latest thrust of a wider assault designed to retrieve a captured soldier and fight Palestinians.

They included a 14-year-old boy shot in the chest, two men in their 30s also shot and five others who died from tank fire, medical officials said.

The operation is part of a two-month Israeli offensive in the territory that has targeted fighters but killed scores of civilians and left Gaza riddled with electricity shortages after its power plant was bombed.

Although Palestinian medical sources said most of those killed yesterday were civilians, the Israeli Army said its troops only opened fire in response to attacks, admitting that forces were coming under heavy attack.

“I know of four different incidents in which gunmen either fired anti-tank missiles or they were approaching the forces,” a spokeswoman said.

She said troops were operating in Shejaiya to “destroy terror infrastructure” and that everything the military did in the Gaza Strip is to create the right conditions for the return of Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Yesterday’s deaths bring to 19 the number of Palestinians killed in the Shejaiya neighborhood since Israeli tanks and troops rolled in on Saturday.

At least 204 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed in Gaza since June 28, when Israel launched its offensive to stop rocket attacks and recover the missing Shalit, captured three days earlier.

Annan, in the West Bank on the third leg of a major Middle East tour, called for Israel to stop its offensive, “all incursions” and its closure on Gaza, and demanded Palestinian fighters to stop firing rockets into the Jewish state. “Two hundred Palestinians have been killed since the end of June,” Annan told a news conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

“This must stop immediately,” he said. “The closure of Gaza must be lifted, the crossing points must be opened.” He also called for a “cessation” of the Qassam rockets fired at Israel by fighters, and for Israel to release Palestinian parliamentarians and officials from the Hamas-led government arrested in the West Bank in late June.

“The creation of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel is the key to solving the problems in this troubled region,” he said.

Abbas, whose moderate Fatah party is working toward a possible national unity government with the governing Islamist party Hamas, warned there could be no security until Israel ends its occupation and a Palestinian state emerges. “Continued occupation of the Arab and Palestinian territories will not achieve peace,” he said. The Palestinian leader earlier renewed calls for fighters to stop firing rockets into Israel, warning that such missiles were sowing “death and destruction” for the Palestinians.

Five Israelis have died as a result of homemade rockets fired from Gaza since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, with most of the missiles causing property damage or landing in open spaces. Back in Gaza, the Israeli Army said it had discovered a large tunnel, 13 meters deep and 150 meters long, running from a house in Shejaiya toward the Karni Crossing with Israel, and released photographs.