Israel Accepts Brief Pause in Fighting for Relief Supplies

GAZA — Under international pressure to ease its 12-day bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Israel agreed on Wednesday to suspend the fighting for three hours a day and permit humanitarian relief goods to reach the beleaguered population. It was not immediately clear whether the militant Hamas movement, which governs Gaza, had also agreed to the plan.

A wounded Palestinian being carried on Tuesday near the United Nations school in Jabaliya, Gaza, that Israeli forces shelled.

The announcement by officials in Jerusalem came a day after Israeli mortar shells killed as many as 40 Palestinians, among them women and children, outside a United Nations school in Gaza.

Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said the idea behind relief corridors was to permit a flow of food and other aid to a population said by U.N. officials to be facing a humanitarian crisis. A statement late Tuesday from Mr. Olmert’s office said the pause would “entail opening geographic areas for certain periods of time during which the population would be able to equip itself and receive the assistance.”

The Associated Press quoted the Israeli B’Tselem human rights group as saying the military had informed it of a planned lull in the afternoon between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. local time. Military offcials said the Israeli measures would allow Gaza residents to leave their homes to seek medical help and buy food.

International relief agencies have warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was increasingly dire. Three-quarters of the 1.5 million residents are currently without power, and hundreds of thousands are without running water, international agencies have said.

John Ging, the chief of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said the pause was “not a solution but it’s a first step.”

With the death toll mounting, President Shimon Peres told Sky News in an interview on Wednesday that Israel would also study cease-fire proposals put forward by Egypt. Agence France-Presse reported on Wednesday that Israeli tanks which reportedly pushed into the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis pulled out before dawn as fighting continued elsewhere. Witnesses said explosions and artillery fire continued to be heard from Gaza as the planned three-hour pause approached.

In Gaza City, some still reeled from events on Tuesday when Israeli mortar fire struck near a U.N. school where many people were taking refuge. The Israeli military contended that Hamas fighters had fired mortars from the school compound, and U.N. officials called for an independent inquiry into the episode.

The rising civilian death toll in crowded Gaza heightened international urgency to end the combat. American and European diplomats said it was highly likely that Mr. Olmert would travel to Egypt on Wednesday to discuss a cease-fire.

But officials in Cairo said on Wednesday it was not definite that the Israeli leader would make the trip. Israel has said it will not end the operation in Gaza until it has crushed Hamas’s ability to fire rockets into its civilian areas.

That has not happened. The Israeli military reported on Wednesday that a rocket fired from Gaza landed in a yard in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and nine people were treated for shock. Three other rockets landed elsewhere.

On Tuesday, one rocket reached farther than ever into Israeli territory, only 20 miles from Tel Aviv, and wounded an infant.

With another day of gory news reports inflaming the Arab world, Israel contended that the deaths at the school, at the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City, demonstrated Hamas’s callousness toward the lives of Palestinian civilians.

The Israeli Defense Forces said that their troops had fired several mortar shells near the school in response to mortar fire from the school compound.

“They shot back to save their own lives,” said Ilan Tal, an Israeli military spokesman and a brigadier general in the reserves. Among the dead, the military said in a statement, were “Hamas terrorist operatives and a mortar battery cell.”

The military identified two Hamas operatives, Imad Abu Asker and Hassan Abu Asker, as having been killed.

A young witness from Jabaliya, Ibrahim Amen, 16, said that he had seen one of the militants, whom he identified as Abu Khaled Abu Asker, in the area of the school right before the attack.

Ibrahim said he saw the militant after he answered calls for volunteers to pile sand around the camp “to help protect the resistance fighters.” Ibrahim went to pile sand near the school with his brother, Iyad, 20, who was then injured by the Israeli mortar fire.

The night before, the United Nations said, three Palestinian men were killed in an Israeli attack on another United Nations school for refugees in Gaza.

“These attacks by Israeli military forces which endanger U.N. facilities acting as places of refuge are totally unacceptable and must not be repeated,” the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said in a statement. “Equally unacceptable are any actions by militants which endanger the Palestinian civilian population.”  United Nations officials initially put the Jabaliya death toll at 30 and said 55 were wounded, with several in critical condition. Palestinian hospital officials said 40 people had been killed, among them 10 children and 5 women.

The death toll in Gaza reached around 640 on Tuesday, according to Palestinian health officials. The United Nations has estimated that about one-fourth of those killed were civilians, though there have been no reliable and current figures in recent days.

International efforts to halt the violence appeared to be moving into a higher gear.

At the United Nations, the Security Council held a high-level meeting attended by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and many foreign ministers to discuss the situation in Gaza. Mr. Abbas and other senior Arab officials supported a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, which was introduced by Libya.

But some members of the Security Council, including the United States, withheld support for any resolution because of efforts in the Middle East to achieve a cease-fire.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said at a news conference in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France that the Israelis and the Palestinians should accept a cease-fire to give Cairo time to continue its efforts toward a durable long-term solution.

Israeli and American officials insist that a cease-fire would have to await guarantees that no more weapons would be smuggled into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt; a possible mechanism for that is the stationing of international observers along the border with Egypt.

President-elect Barack Obama broke his silence about the Gaza fighting on Tuesday, telling reporters, “The loss of civilian life in Gaza and Israel is a source of deep concern for me.”

Israeli losses have also risen since the ground invasion began on Saturday. The military said that three of its soldiers were killed late Monday night when an Israeli tank shell was mistakenly fired at a building they occupied.

A fourth soldier was also killed Monday night, very possibly also by an Israeli tank shell, the military said. Two soldiers, including one on Tuesday, have been killed in clashes with Hamas.

Before the Israeli ground campaign began, three Israeli civilians and a soldier were killed by rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel.

In Al-Nasir, a district of Gaza City, families fleeing the fighting in the north poured into a United Nations boys’ school. Thirty members of the extended al-Sultan family from Beit Lahiya, including more than 20 children, huddled in one small classroom.

Ayisha al-Sultan, 36, who is married to a heart surgeon, said she had left behind a comfortable villa where each of her five children has a separate room.

“Now look at us,” she said. “At night we covered the floor tiles with paper for the kids to sleep on. We took off our jackets and covered them.”

Tags: Gaza, Israel, Jerusalem, World