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Renewed Israel, Palestinian truce off to shaky start

14 August 2014 03:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Israel and the Palestinians renewed a truce that had largely tempered a five-week-old war, but the deal got off to a shaky start on Thursday with rockets from Gaza slamming into Israel and Israel retaliating with air strikes, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Hamas, which denied involvement in firing some of what Israel counted as eight rockets shot just as an earlier truce expired on Wednesday, and accused the Jewish state of violating the new truce by launching air strikes.

There were no reported casualties in any of the incidents that marred an Egyptian-brokered agreement announced in Cairo to extend a ceasefire begun on Monday by another five days, or until Aug. 19.

Israel had no comment on the deal the Palestinians announced in Cairo. Egyptian mediators had won the deal to extend a ceasefire when the sides were clearly headed toward failure to bridge key differences in time for a midnight deadline.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israeli forces to fire rocks in response to what he called a breach of the ceasefire by Hamas.

Hamas official Izzat Reshiq denied the Palestinians had breached the truce, and denounced Israel's air strikes as "a violation of the calm."

The Israeli military said its air strikes were "targeting terror sites across the Gaza Strip," and these attacks were followed by two more rocket attacks at Israel from Gaza.

In announcing the truce extension on Wednesday, Azzam Al-Ahmed, the head Palestinian negotiator in Egypt, a member of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's mainstream Fatah faction said on Wednesday evening in Cairo that "it was agreed to extend ceasefire by five days."

The extension was intended to give the sides more time to reach a more lasting deal after they had failed to bridge differences over an Egyptian proposal for a permanent truce that addressed a key Palestinian demand to lift the Israeli and Egyptian blockades of the Gaza Strip.

It was unclear how Israel's and Egypt's security concerns about Islamist Hamas, the dominant force in Gaza, were addressed by Egypt's new proposal, or how it could be reconciled with Israel's demand for Gaza's demilitarization.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told Al-Aqsa Hamas television on Wednesday that the group would insist on "lifting the Gaza blockade" and reducing movement restrictions on the territory's 1.8 million residents, as a prerequisite to a "permanent calm".