Israel has agreed not to launch new strikes on the Gaza Strip if militants in the Hamas-run territory stop firing rockets, a senior defence official said on Tuesday.The conditional agreement was reached with Egypt, which is seeking to broker a deal to achieve a truce and lift the blockade of Gaza after a surge in violence last week plunged the already faltering peace talks into jeopardy.
“Israel has reached an agreement with the Egyptians that if there is no rocket fire from Gaza, it will not launch attacks against Gaza,” the official, requesting anonymity, told reporters. The deal is subject to Gaza not becoming “a ticking bomb” where militants transport rockets or make other preparations for attacking the Jewish state.
The official said that while Israel had agreed not to launch a broad offensive, it reserved the right to attack specific targets if the need arose. He said Egypt, for its part agreed “to do everything in its power to prevent weapons being smuggled into Gaza”. Efforts to bring about a ceasefire have gathered pace, with senior US and Israeli envoys holding talks in Egypt over the past week, as have delegations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, who lost control of Gaza when Hamas violently seized the enclave last June, said on Monday there was agreement in principle to reach a truce.
No reason to retaliate: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the army would have no reason to retaliate if the militants stopped their attacks. But he vehemently denied there were any negotiations “either direct or indirect” on the issue. Israel, the United States and the European Union view Hamas as a terrorist organisation and have sought to isolate the group since it won Palestinian democratic elections in January 2006. But Washington encouraged Cairo to launch its mediation efforts amid fears that the recent bloodshed in Gaza could torpedo peace talks that were re-launched in the United States in November but have made little progress since.
Mohammed Bassiuni, the Egyptian ParliamentÂ’s National Security Committee chairman, said on Monday that Egypt was working on a comprehensive initiative to include a truce, an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza and an exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas.
Israel and Cairo were also working on a deal to allow Egypt to increase the number of border police deployed along its 14-kilometre border with Gaza to 1,500, said a senior Israeli official. This would require amending an annex to the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace deal, which declared the Sinai peninsula a demilitarised zone.
Gaza militants in January blew up part of a border wall, allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flood out of the tiny coastal enclave into Egypt to stock up on desperately needed supplies.
Hamas denies: Meanwhile, Hamas denied on Tuesday comments by its rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that its pursuit of an Egyptian-mediated truce with Israel was motivated by a desire to protect its leaders from Israeli assassination. “These remarks are nothing but lies aimed at damaging Hamas’s image,” Sami Abu Zuhri, an official of the Islamist group said in a statement issued amid a lull in violence between Israel and militants in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. “Hamas leaders seek martyrdom and would never bargain over the blood of their people like others do,” said Abu Zuhri.