Partial cease-fire in Gaza rejected
JABALIYA, GAZA STRIP — Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Friday that militants were prepared to stop firing rockets at Israel if it would halt all military action in the Palestinian territories. Israel rejected the offer, saying it would respond positively only to a total truce.
Similar proposals have failed to curb fighting, and a spokesman for the ruling Hamas group quickly stepped back from the cease-fire talk, which came as fighting between militants and Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip claimed the lives of a 10-year-old Palestinian boy and a militant filming the clashes.
A third Palestinian died Friday of wounds sustained in earlier violence. It wasn’t immediately known whether he was a militant or civilian.
Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said the offer of a partial cease-fire in exchange for a suspension of all Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories was ludicrous and “a media stunt.”
But Eisin said Israel regarded recent efforts by moderate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, of the Fatah faction, to achieve a “complete stop of all violence” as a “very positive development.”
A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Ismail Radwan, watered down Haniyeh’s talk of a cease-fire, saying the two factions had agreed to “alter their strategies of resistance” if Israel halted fire.
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