Israel dismissed an offer of a six-month truce from the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas today, saying the group merely wanted time to rearm.
The Hamas offer came after several weeks of negotiation with Egyptian officials and after several meetings with former US president Jimmy Carter, who travelled to Damascus last week to meet the movement's leader, Khaled Meshal.
Egyptian officials, led by the intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, are expected to continue talking with Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups to try to establish a ceasefire in Gaza that might eventually extend to the West Bank. Suleiman is due in Israel next week to speak to officials there.
Israel has refused direct talks with Hamas, which, like the US and the EU, it regards as a terrorist organisation. "Hamas is biding time in order to rearm and regroup," said David Baker, an Israeli government spokesman. "There would be no need for Israel's defensive actions if Hamas would cease and desist from committing terrorist attacks on Israelis."
Baker suggested Israeli military strikes in Gaza would continue. "Israel will continue to act to protect its citizens," he said.
Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas as well as other more hardline organisations, continue to fire makeshift rockets into southern Israel. Two weeks ago militants, though not from Hamas, attacked the Nahal Oz fuel crossing into Gaza, killing two Israeli civilians. A Hamas attack last weekend on another crossing left 13 Israeli soldiers injured.
The death toll from Israeli strikes in Gaza has been far higher. According to UN figures, 53 children have been killed and 177 injured since January. One particularly heavy Israeli operation in Jabalia in early March killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians. Two Israeli soldiers and one civilian were also killed.
Some believe this high death toll, together with a tightening economic blockade on Gaza, may have pushed Hamas into offering a ceasefire. A severe diesel and petrol shortage meant that yesterday the UN had to halt its food distributions to around 800,000 Palestinians.
Until now Hamas had insisted on a simultaneous, mutual ceasefire in both Gaza and the West Bank. This latest offer, however, was to begin only in Gaza and brought with it the demand that Israel open the crossings into Gaza.
During his week of meetings, Carter had also pushed Hamas to announce a ceasefire. However, his visit was criticised by Israeli leaders. Israel's ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, described Carter as a "bigot" for travelling to Syria to meet the Hamas leadership. Speaking on Thursday, Gillerman said the former president, who helped to negotiate the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, "went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands".
Carter was told by the Hamas leaders that the group would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as long as a peace agreement was approved by the Palestinian people.
In a separate incident today a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israeli security guards in an industrial zone along the line that separates Israel and the West Bank, near the Palestinian city of Tulkarem. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a group linked to the Fatah movement of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was in Washington today, where he has been holding talks with George Bush.
Riyad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, condemned the attack, which he said was intended "to undermine the efforts by the Palestinian government to undertake full security responsibilities in the West Bank".
