Cairo has secured a long-term truce between Palestinian factions and Israel, news reports announced late Tuesday afternoon. The truce opens the way for the resumption of extended indirect talks. Late Tuesday, the Qassam Brigades continued to fire missiles against Ashkelon while Israeli occupation forces bombed a residential apartment block in Gaza. But in Cairo the diplomatic breakthrough was hailed by Hamas as a “victory”. “The negotiations have reached an agreement with a formula that embodies the resistance of our people and is a victory for the resistance,” Hamas's exiled deputy leader, Mussa Abu Marzouk, wrote on his Facebook page. Abu-Marzouk, a Hamas representative in the Palestinian delegation at the Cairo talks, was in a celebratory mood. Thousands of Palestinians flooded onto the streets of Gaza City upon receiving news of the truce. Among them were gunmen, some of whom were from Hamas, who fired in the air in celebration. “We announce the Palestinian leadership's agreement with Egypt's call for a comprehensive and lasting truce, beginning at 7:00 pm (1600 GMT) today,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared in a televised address from the West Bank city of Ramallah. The claimed deal would end seven weeks of deadly conflict in Gaza that saw over 2,000 Palestinians killed, and more than 10,000 injured. In addition to the truce, the Egyptian proposal paves the way for lifting the blockade on Gaza as concerns goods and fishing rights. Egypt has been pressing Israel to open the border crossings and extend the zone for Palestinian fishermen up to six to 12 miles off the Gaza coast. An Egyptian source who has been observing the negotiations told Al-Ahram Weekly that the period of the truce would give the two sides and the sponsor, Egypt, time to build trust between the two sides. Cairo has also said that it wants to sponsor another round of talks to complete inter-Palestinian reconciliation. Said Abu Marzouk: “The negotiations ended with an agreement which embodies the resistance of our people and a victory for the resistance.” At the time of going to press, Israel had made no comment on the truce. Ziad Nakhala, deputy secretary-general of the Islamic Jihad, earlier threatened to continue the war if Israel does not abide by the ceasefire, should it go into effect. Reportedly, Abu Marzouk was in the Qatari capital Doha up to Monday night. A source closely connected to the talks said that the Hamas member of the Palestinian delegation had met with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal in Doha. Meshal also approved of the Egyptian proposal, the source said, “but he [was] coming under pressure from Turkey, which objects to some of the terms that have appeared in the Egyptian document, in spite of the fact that the terms to which Turkey objects were grounded in the 2012 document.” The source suggested that Qatar, which has been accused of obstructing an agreement, may not have been able to “dictate its conditions” this time. The issues that will be placed on the negotiating table if the truce holds are major ones, including the seaport and airport, even though these matters were settled and approved in the Oslo Accords, as Nakhala noted. The two sides may take a combatants' break, but confidence-building is another question. Speaking to the Weekly by phone from Nazareth, Jackie Khouri, an Arab columnist at Haaretz, said: “Israel is operating on the premise that it is confronting Hamas on the grounds that it, rather than the PA (Palestinian Authority) or any other party, holds all the cards in Gaza.” However, he stressed, Netanyahu has no political solution. “He is in a dilemma. To agree to a truce is to hand gains to Hamas, but continuing war and a transition to a war of attrition is also costly.” Israel's latest war against Gaza has already cost more than nine billion shekels ($2.5 billion) in military expenditures alone, according to the Hebrew-language The Marker. The economic newspaper quoted Israeli finance ministry sources as saying that they expect the costs to increase considerably. A reserve soldier costs 500 shekels a day. Deploying 60,000 of them comes to 30 million shekels a day and 200 million shekels a week. If a more extensive recruitment of reserves is required, the costs could soar to a billion shekels. As for the political repercussions in Israel, a recent opinion poll conducted by Israel's Channel 2 reported a large and sudden plunge in Netanyahu's popularity ratings during the first four days of last week. A large segment of the Israeli public is dissatisfied with the way he handled recent events in Gaza, or what Israeli military agencies refer to as the “war of attrition.” According to the results of the poll, 50 per cent of the respondents said that they disproved of Netanyahu's performance in the war in Gaza during the four days in question. One of the major causes cited for this response was the large increase in displaced persons from the area bordering the Gaza Strip, due to barrages of missiles and mortar bombs. Sobhi Asila is editor-in-chief of the Israeli Anthology periodical at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies and a specialist in opinion polling. He studied the Israeli Channel 2 poll closely. “We should not interpret this poll as favourable to the Palestinians,” he told the Weekly. “On the contrary, as is clear from closer inspection, a large segment of the Israeli public blames Netanyahu for being soft on Hamas. In their opinion, his failure to intercept the missiles coming from Gaza means that the government should have been tougher against Hamas — that it should have eliminated Hamas's weapons and Hamas itself.” Asila also commented on the battle of one-upmanship among politicians on the Israeli right, such as Avigdor Lieberman. “The mood of the Israeli right is prevailing in politics and this is driving the Israeli government to more hard-line stances,” he said. A Hamas field commander, who declined to be named, told the Weekly that the resistance could not die or be eliminated as long as the occupation persists. “Even if Hamas ended — and that is impossible — there would emerge even fiercer opponents to the occupation.” Nevertheless, he said, Hamas leaders prefer the option of a truce. “They regard the truce as an acceptable framework, especially for the Palestinian people in Gaza who are suffering two-fold, due to the blockade and then to the destruction.” The Hamas fighter said his younger brother, a noncombatant, had been killed, and added, “That blood will not go in vain. We will not leave our land occupied. We will be followed by those who will liberate us.”
