Guns Fall Silent on Gaza's Ruins

By SANA ABDALLAH

AMMAN -- The guns fell silent upon Gaza overnight after Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian factions separately declared their own ceasefires, revealing the shocking extent of devastation as rescue workers pulled out more bodies from under the rubble brought about by the deadliest Israeli war on the strip since 1967.

Ten more Palestinian corpses were dug out from under the ruins on Monday, according to medical sources, who said that rescue teams were still searching for survivors and bodies under homes demolished across the Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, hours after Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire, almost 100 bodies were recovered, bringing the Palestinian death toll to 1,300 killed since Israel unleashed its war on Dec. 27, as Gaza hospitals struggled to treat 5,300 wounded. Rescue workers expected the number to be higher.

Gaza emergency sources said the vast majority of victims were civilians, and 32 percent of the dead, or 410, were children, and 104 were women. About 1,855 children and 795 women were among the injured during the 22-day onslaught, they said.

Meanwhile, Hamas' military wing, the Ezzeddine al-Qassam Brigades, said Monday that 48 of its fighters were killed, including one suicide bomber, and insisted it had killed at least 80 Israeli soldiers, disputing Israeli army figures that 10 of its troops were killed in combat and three civilians by Palestinian rocket fire. Hamas' armed wing said it had fired 900 rockets during the war.

Islamic Jihad's military group, Saraya al-Quds, reported Sunday that 34 of its fighters died, including two suicide attackers.

Israel said it killed 500 Hamas members, and its outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared the offensive had achieved the goals it had set out for Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since ousting the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in June 2007.

Hamas and its allies, however, claimed a "victory" against Israel, saying that the offensive neither reduced its rocket capabilities nor the will of the resistance, accusing Israel of only having destroyed the civilian infrastructure and killing defenseless civilians.

Olmert declared a unilateral ceasefire as of 2 am on Sunday and Israeli tanks withdrew from the cities to the borders, but remained some two to three kilometers within the boundaries of the Gaza Strip.

Until Hamas declared its own one-week ceasefire on Sunday afternoon to allow humanitarian assistance into the strip, militants had fired more than 15 rockets at Israel.

The Islamist group said it gave Israel one week to pull its forces completely from the positions it occupied along the frontiers and will work on initiatives that entail the opening of the border crossings and lifting the Israeli blockade that had preceded the military operations.

Israeli sources said the tanks were expected to pull out completely before U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian National Department of Statistics estimated the material losses at $1.6 billion, saying the Israeli offensive completely demolished 4,000 buildings and severely damaged 20,000 others, leaving at least 100,000 people homeless.

The reconstruction of the impoverished strip was taken up at a regular Arab economic summit in Kuwait Monday, where the leaders were expected to set up a $2 billion fund for rebuilding what Israel destroyed.

Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz announced a donation of $1 billion in his opening remarks at the summit, a week after Qatar donated $250 million.

Kuwait's emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, pledged $34 million to the U.N. relief agency for refugees, UNRWA, after coming under pressure from Kuwaiti MPs not to give assistance to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' PA, accusing his authority of corruption.

As Gaza seemed to have turned into a charity case in the wake of the devastating war, at least on the surface, Arab diplomats said that serious political moves are needed to avoid yet another Israeli war in the Middle East, which they say requires a lot of work in healing inter-Palestinian and internal Arab divisions.

"We have to overcome Arab political differences that led to a division in the Arab ranks, which can be exploited by those who want to achieve their regional ambitions," the Saudi monarch said at the Kuwait summit opening.

He warned that the Saudi-sponsored Arab peace initiative of 2002 – which offered Israel peace with all the Arab nations and normal ties in return for its withdrawal from the Arab territories it occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state – "will not remain on the table forever."

At another summit held in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh on Gaza Sunday, which also gathered some European leaders, Jordan's King Abdullah II warned: "If we do not take action toward a permanent solution based on the two-state solution, the world leaders will find themselves once again forced to convene to address a new Israeli aggression on the Palestinians."