As I've previously mentioned Israel on Friday (25/7/14) declared a unilateral 12 hour cease-fire starting at 05:00 (08:00 local) on Saturday (26/7/14). Hamas also agreed to join that cease-fire creating a humanitarian truce.
The purpose of this truce was to allow humanitarian aid such as food and medicines to be distributed throughout Gaza whilst allowing the injured and civilians to be evacuated to either Israel or Egypt or to the roughly 55% of Gaza that is not subject to military action. It also gave everybody a short break from the relentless horror of aeriel bombardment that frequently drives even hardened, professional soldiers insane.
The truce also provided authorities in Gaza to clear through the rubble of destroyed building discovering bodies of the dead as they did so. As a result the death toll in Gaza now stands at around 1050 up from 805 on Friday with some 245 bodies being recovered primarily from the Shejayia district of Gaza City. However if for no other reason then the chaotic nature of the situation this death toll is not considered hugely accurate with clear evidence of the same fatalities being recorded several times over. Also there seems to be confusion over whether the Gazan Health Authority is classing everyone under 18 years old as a child or using the accepted wartime definition of a child as anyone under 15 years old*. Finally this represents the total death toll because Gazan authorities do not distinguish between civilian and combatants. According to Israeli estimates - the only ones available - at least 450 of those killed in Gaza have been Hamas fighters.
Due to the scale of the task the United Nations (UN) requested that the truce be extended by a further 24 hours. This prompted Israel to immediately extend the existing truce by four hours so the UN's request could be discussed by it's cabinet. There was no similar statement from Hamas. However within minutes of the original planned end of the cease-fire 17:00 (20:00 local) mortars were fired from Gaza into southern Israel. It is not clear whether these were fired by Hamas or one of its rivals in an attempt to force Hamas and Israel into breaking the cease-fire. This actually highlights one of the problems in the Israel/Palestine conflict that has been increasing in recent years.
Islamist ideology is most certainly not a monolithic bloc and instead represents more of a spectrum. Despite the claims of Israeli hawks Hamas are actually very much at the moderate end of that spectrum which progresses to include groups such as Al Qaeda right up to groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who genuinely want to provoke the war of wars that will see the Messiah return to earth and the bring about of the apocalypse. Due to the relentless sectarian propaganda that is being pumped out of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in an effort to fuel the conflict in Syria more and more Muslims have begun to identify with the nihilist Islamist views of ISIL forcing groups such as Hamas to behave in an ever more extreme fashion in order to avoid being overthrown by rivals further along the spectrum.
Whether it was in response to internal pressures or because is was part of their own ideology about an hour later - well within the 4 hour truce extension - Hamas did resume firing half a dozen rockets into southern and central Israel. The irony was that at the time several thousand Israeli Jews had gathered in Tel Aviv to protest the operation in Gaza - an operation that only began after the hawkish Yiseral Beiteinu Party pulled out of the governing coalition in protest at the centre-right Likud Party's perceived inaction in the face of Hamas rockets fire. The resumption of Hamas rocket fire of course broke up this demonstration early as the protesters were forced to head for the nearest bomb shelters.
Despite the resumption of Hamas rocket fire Israel decided to agree to the UN's request and unilaterally extended the truce for a further 24 hours starting at 21:00 (00:00). Unfortunately Hamas declined to follow suit and continued to fire several dozen rockets into Israel. After seven hours and several casualties Israel started to return fire to suppress that rocket fire bringing an end to the truce.
Three hours later Hamas requested a new truce. Due to the fact that Hamas made no attempt to cease-fire during that time and a reasonable suspicion that Hamas was merely trying to buy time to regroup by disrupting the momentum of Israel's operation that request was denied by Israel. However as Israel's military had planned to spend today in a state of cease-fire its use of air-power and artillery has been extremely limited.
After all the hope is that Israel's ground forces will be able to get on with their job of dismantling Hamas' tunnels and bunkers without having to call in air-support or artillery fire.
16:55 on 27/7/14 (UK date).
*I personally think that definition is too low. However it is the agreed definition meaning that the flip side of the argument is that Hamas along with the UK and the US use child soldiers.
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