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Hamas calls on West to end boycott, as Gaza truce takes hold
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 19 - 06 - 2008


A fragile truce took hold in the Gaza Strip
Thursday, ending, for the time being at least, months of deadly
violence and prompting Hamas to call for an end to the Western
boycott against it, according to dpa.
The truce - the result of months of indirect, Egyptian-led
negotiations between Israel and the movement ruling
Gaza - took effect at 6 am (0300 GMT) Thursday morning.
But flexing their muscles in the hours before the deadline,
Palestinian militants launched 32 rockets and more than 10 mortar
shells at southern Israel, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
Israel launched an airstrike at one group of the rocket launchers
in the central Gaza Strip before dawn Thursday, killing a Hamas
militant just one hour and a half before the truce began.
After the truce took effect, an Israeli naval vessel also fired
warning shots Wednesday morning at Palestinian fishing boats, which
the military said had drifted into a "closed security zone" on the
maritime border between the northern Gaza Strip and Israel.
Despite the last-minute violence, the truce took precarious hold
and no more incidents were reported during its first hours Wednesday.
Although Israel negotiated the truce with Hamas indirectly,
internal Israeli critics have charged the deal grants legitimacy to
the movement and recognition of it as the de-facto
ruler of the Strip.
Hamas too called on Western leaders "to change their attitude"
toward the movement after it committed to the truce.
"We call on the international community to reconsider its decision
to impose an embargo on the movement," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri
told reporters in Gaza City.
But European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, although he
welcomed the truce, said it was too early to say whether the EU could
begin holding direct talks with Hamas, which the bloc considers a
terrorist organization.
The truce, he nevertheless said in Brussels, could create "a
dynamic that will allow political dialogue to continue."
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Hamas was still a
"terrorist organization," with which Israel did not and would not
hold direct negotiations.
"Hamas and the other terrorist organizations have not changed and
have not become patrons of peace. These are contemptible and
bloodthirsty terrorists," Olmert told a conference near Tel Aviv.
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald from Jerusalem
published Thursday, he also warned that the truce was Hamas' last
chance to avoid a massive military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Olmert was scheduled to travel to Egypt Tuesday, for talks with
Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak on the truce brokered by Cairo.
The first stage of the three-phase, six-month truce entails a
mutual end of hostilities.
According to Hamas officials, Israel is to lift severe
restrictions on the entry of fuel into the Strip already in the first
hours of the truce.
As of Sunday, it is to ease restrictions on the entry of other
goods.
One week after, Cairo is to invite Hamas, Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas and European Union representatives for talks on a
mechanism to open the Rafah border crossing between southern Gaza and
Egypt.
Israel has made the opening of Rafah conditional on the freedom of
Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, held captive in Gaza by Hamas for the
past two years.
Intense, renewed negotiations on his release in exchange for
Palestinian militants imprisoned in Israel are to begin
simultaneously to the talks on Rafah, with the Israeli official
charged with negotiating the prisoners swap, Ofer Dekel, also due to
travel to Egypt next week.
Shalit's parents have expressed outrage over the truce, saying
they were promised by Olmert that Israel would not agree to a deal
without securing guarantees for Shalit's release. Their lawyers sent
a protest letter to the Israeli premier, threatening to petition to
Israel's supreme court against the agreement.
Western countries imposed a boycott on Hamas after it won the 2006
Palestinian parliamentary elections, but refused calls to renounce
violence, honour past interim agreements calling for a two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and change its charter
to accept Israel's right to exist.
Europe and the United States have instead dealt only with Abbas of
the rival Fatah party, who was elected in separate presidential
elections a year earlier on a platform that did support a two-state
solution.
After a short-lived unity government with Fatah, Hamas seized sole
control of the Gaza Strip one year ago, by ousting security forces
loyal to Abbas and Fatah.
Since the Gaza take-over, fighters have launched more than 4,000
rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel, killing four Israelis.
Israel's attacks against the densely-
populated Strip have killed more than 360 Palestinians.


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