Calls for Truce Fuel Hope in Gaza Standoff

Both Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian government expressed hope Saturday of arranging a cease-fire to end their bloody 2-week-old confrontation over the capture of an Israeli soldier.

Israeli troops and armor also pulled back from a swath of northern Gaza they had held for two days, though military commanders warned that they could reenter the area at any time to quell rocket fire by Palestinian militants. Israeli forces remained dug in at a disused airport in the southern Gaza Strip.

Early today, Israeli airstrikes targeted a bridge in northern Gaza, an area in southern Gaza described by the army as a training camp for militants, and a group of gunmen near the main commercial crossing at Karni. Several Palestinians were reported injured.

The calls for a cease-fire came from Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas official, and an Israeli Cabinet minister, Ophir Pines-Paz, who raised the possibility of a comprehensive accord that would free the captive and halt rocket attacks.

It was the second consecutive day that a senior Israeli official had spoken publicly of the prospect of a compromise in the standoff over the soldier, 19-year-old Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was seized June 25 in a cross-border raid.

Both sides have powerful incentives for finding a negotiated solution, but serious obstacles remain to any agreement. With thousands of Israeli troops and heavily armed Palestinian guerrillas in close proximity to densely populated areas of Gaza, conflict could flare again at any moment.

And if the young soldier is killed by his captors, Israel almost certainly will unleash a prolonged and punishing onslaught. Israeli officials say they believe he is alive and unharmed except for minor injuries suffered during the raid, in which two other Israeli soldiers were killed.

Although Israel appears to be dropping its insistence that it will not trade Palestinian prisoners for Shalit, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Saturday that the soldier’s safe return must precede any concessions. A day earlier, Cabinet minister Avi Dichter had spoken of freeing prisoners as a “reciprocal gesture” if Shalit’s captors released him.

One major question is whether Haniyeh has the clout to force militant factions who hold Shalit -- and who are thought to answer primarily to the Islamist group’s exiled leadership in Damascus, the Syrian capital -- to agree to any deal.

Haniyeh’s statement, issued through government spokesman Ghazi Hamad, was vaguely worded but appeared to hold out the prospect that militants would halt their rocket fire if Israel withdrew its troops.

“If we want to get out of the current crisis, it is necessary to return to calm, on the basis of a mutual halt to all military operations,” the statement said.

The Hamas government, already broke and diplomatically isolated, has been under increasing pressure since the capture of Shalit. Israel has bombed Haniyeh’s office and a key ministry building and threatened to assassinate senior figures in the government.

But in the course of the fighting, Hamas’ street following has appeared to be as strong as ever, if not stronger.

Framing a prisoner swap in the context of some larger accord could offer a face-saving way out for both Olmert’s and Haniyeh’s governments. Hamas is unlikely to defy Palestinian street sentiment and release the soldier without some gains to point to. Olmert would need to somehow justify an about-face in his unequivocal declarations that no prisoners would be freed.

There has been no direct diplomatic contact between the two sides. Mediation is being carried out primarily by Egypt.

Pines-Paz, a member of Olmert’s “security Cabinet” of senior advisors, suggested Saturday that Israel was interested in “changing the rules of the game” in Gaza.

“If we reach a situation in which there are no kidnappings, no rockets, no tunnels, no raids into our territory, certainly Israel will have to reciprocate,” Pines-Paz told Israel Radio.

Fighting during Israel’s 11-day-old offensive reached a peak Thursday. Twenty-six Palestinians were killed that day or died later of wounds, and an Israeli soldier was also killed.

There were scattered exchanges of fire Saturday between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen, including an early-morning confrontation in the Shajaiya neighborhood on the outskirts of Gaza City that left three Palestinians dead. It was the first time during the incursion that a clash had taken place so close to the territory’s main metropolis.

At nightfall, an explosion rocked a house in Shajaiya, and Palestinian medics said a father and his young daughter were killed.

However, the Israeli military said there was no artillery or tank fire in the area at the time.

The army said it launched an airstrike Saturday evening near Karni, which is near Shajaiya, a longtime Hamas stronghold. But a spokesman said the strike took place in an open area, not the neighborhood itself.

In the northern village of Beit Lahiya, the scene of Thursday’s fiercest fighting, departing Israeli troops left behind a landscape of shell-pocked buildings, toppled power poles and streets chewed up by tank treads.

Many Palestinians who huddled in their homes for two days emerged blinking and shaken to survey the damage inflicted by airstrikes, artillery barrages and firefights.

“My kids were so frightened the entire time that they wet their beds and vomited -- we simply couldn’t comfort them,” said Bassam Kanwa, 30.

Even with a relative lull in fighting, which coincided with the Jewish Sabbath, Gaza remained so dangerous that U.S. officials sought to ensure that American citizens could leave the territory if they wished.

Gaza is effectively sealed off, but U.S. consular officials Saturday arranged for a convoy to evacuate 65 American citizens, most of them Palestinians holding dual nationality.