Region

TOBRUK, Libya — Libyan lawmakers, gathered far from the country’s chaos and warring militias, have elected a judge as the new parliament speaker.

Ageila Saleh Eissa narrowly defeated his rival for the post, Abu-Bakr Bira, in a 77-74 vote late Monday night from among 158 lawmakers who convened the parliament’s inaugural session in the eastern city of Tobruk.

Weeks of fighting in the capital, Tripoli, and the nation’s second-largest city, Benghazi, have killed more than 230 people and forced most foreigners and diplomats to leave Libya. Because of the violence in Tripoli and Benghazi, the parliament session was held in Tobruk, an anti-Islamist stronghold and a militia-free zone.

Eissa is the country’s third parliament speaker since the downfall and killing of longtime dictator Muammar Qadhafi in the 2011 uprising and civil war.

He held several judicial posts in the east under Qadhafi but his political affiliation is unknown. Opponents, however, accuse him of being a Qadhafi loyalist.

The Tobruk parliament meeting was dominated by opponents of Islamists, underscoring the defeat suffered in recent elections by factions of political Islam who previously led a majority in the house. Islamist factions and their allies did not attend the session.

In the weeks leading up the session, Islamic militias — armed wings of Islamic factions and cities’ allied to them — launched a violent offensive, battling with rivals in Tripoli and overwhelming much of Benghazi.

Opponents accuse Islamists of pushing the country closer to a civil war to make up for their election losses. The Islamists, for their part, claim they are battling remnants of Qadhafi’s regime.

The speaker of the previous parliament, Nouri Abu-Sahmein, an Islamist-leaning lawmaker, declared the new parliament’s inaugural session as “illegal” since it took place despite his insistence that lawmakers convene in Tripoli.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A 72-hour truce took hold in Gaza on Tuesday as Israel withdrew troops following four weeks of bitter fighting and Palestinians ventured out to find scenes of destruction.

The guns fell silent after 29 days of fighting, bringing relief to millions as both sides counted the cost from a conflict that killed at least 1,867 Palestinians and 67 people in Israel.

Officials on both sides confirmed they had sent small delegations to Cairo for talks aimed at securing a permanent ceasefire after the 72-hour window closes.

“Is this is really my town?” asked Khayri Hasan Al Masri, a father of three who returned to heavily damaged Beit Hanoun in the north for the first time since fleeing for his life when the ground offensive began on July 17.

Gaping holes have pierced the walls of his home. There is a mortar in the living room, a bazooka upstairs.

“What am I going to tell my wife and children? I don’t want them to see this! They will go crazy. How can I explain all this?” he sighed, his feet crunching over debris.

In southern Israel, there was relief but scepticism.

“I never trust Hamas; we don’t trust them,” said Orly Doron, an Israeli mother living in a kibbutz on the Gaza border that has been battered by rocket fire.

“We had three or four ceasefires during this war; we all saw they weren’t kept.”

In a sun-baked field down the road, dozens of dust-covered tanks sat parked in the field, just kilometres from Gaza, as their crews laughed and smoked.

Just minutes before the truce took hold, sirens wailed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as Hamas fired 16 rockets over the border, while Israeli warplanes carried out at least five strikes on Gaza.

Israeli troops leave Gaza 

As the truce went into force, Israel confirmed it had pulled out all of its troops, ending a nearly three-week ground operation.

Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner said troops would be “deployed in defensive positions” outside Gaza and would respond to any truce violations.

Egypt announced the ceasefire late on Monday.

It took effect after the quietest night since fighting began. Medics in Gaza reported no deaths or injuries since midnight, although two people died from wounds sustained earlier.

The quiet allowed emergency workers to move into previously inaccessible areas, with the worst devastation near the southern city of Rafah, which had been flattened in a massive Israeli assault that began Friday.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Deputy Economy Minister Taysir Amro said the 29-day war had caused damage of up to $6 billion (4.5 billion euros).

It was the second time in four days that the two sides had agreed to observe a 72-hour humanitarian truce. The last attempt on
August 1 — brokered by Washington and the UN — was shattered within just 90 minutes.

The latest breakthrough emerged in Cairo where Palestinian and Egyptian mediators had held two days of talks with Hamas and Islamic Jihad representatives.

Israel and Hamas, the de facto power in Gaza, confirmed they would abide by the new ceasefire.

Officials from both sides confirmed to AFP that they had sent delegations to Cairo for talks, with the Israeli Security Cabinet meeting to discuss efforts to secure a long-term ceasefire deal.

Israel had earlier refused to join.

Cairo consultations 

The United States and the United Nations welcomed Tuesday’s truce, saying the onus was on Hamas to uphold its end of the deal.

Israel has also been subject to increasingly harsh criticism over the high number of Palestinian civilian casualties.

The army says it destroyed 32 cross-border tunnels, struck nearly 4,800 targets and killed 900 Palestinian “terrorists”.

“They were part of a strategic plan of Hamas, and an investment of approximately $100 million worth of materials, and we have now removed that threat,” Lerner said.

“We struck just over 3,000 rockets; they launched over 3,300 rockets and we expect that they still have about 3,000 rockets left. This is a challenge we have to address.”

UN agency OCHA says 1,312 of the Palestinian dead are civilians, including 408 children and 214 women.

Ahead of the Cairo talks, Yossi Kuperwasser, director general of the strategic affairs ministry, said Israel needed assurances that “this ceasefire is going to be different from previous ones, that it’s going to last for a long time and that Hamas is not going to rearm itself”.

Negotiators in the Egyptian capital are likely to face tough challenges with conflicting demands on both sides.

The Palestinians insist Israel end its eight-year blockade of the Gaza Strip and that border crossings be opened.

Israel wants Gaza fully demilitarised, conditioning its facilitation of reconstruction in Gaza on the international community stripping the enclave of heavy weapons.

LONDON — Sayeeda Warsi, a senior minister in Britain’s Foreign Office, resigned on Tuesday, accusing Prime Minister David Cameron’s government of taking a “morally indefensible” approach to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

While the British government has repeatedly called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, Cameron has come in for criticism from political opponents and some members of his own party for what they say has been his reluctance to condemn Israel’s actions in stronger terms.

Warsi announced her decision as Israel pulled its ground forces out of the Gaza Strip and started a 72-hour ceasefire with Hamas mediated by Egypt as a first step towards negotiations on a more enduring end to the month-old war.

Gaza officials say the war has killed 1,865 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed since fighting began on July 8, after a surge in Palestinian rocket launches.

Warsi’s resignation is embarrassing for Cameron, who has been accused of filling his government with too many middle-class white males. Warsi was not a full Cabinet member but had the right to attend, and played an important role in mediating between the government and Britain’s Muslim community.

Warsi, a baroness who sits in the upper house of parliament, in 2010 became Britain’s first Muslim to serve in Cabinet but was later demoted to be a senior minister of state at the Foreign Office, and a minister for faith and communities.

She announced her resignation on Twitter, publishing a copy of a letter she sent Cameron with the reasons for her decision.

“Our approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible, is not in Britain’s national interest, and will have a long term detrimental impact on our reputation internationally and domestically,” Warsi, 43, said.

Megaphone diplomacy

Cameron, who is holidaying in Portugal with his family, said he had been sorry to receive her letter and regretted that they had not been able to speak about her decision beforehand.

“Israel has the right to defend itself. But we have consistently made clear our grave concerns about the heavy toll of civilian casualties and have called on Israel to exercise restraint,” he wrote in response. “We have consistently called for an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire.”

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond defended the government and said he had been surprised by the timing of Warsi’s decision, given that some progess was now being made in Gaza.

“To my colleagues who say can you do a bit more megaphone diplomacy over here or over there, offend one side or the other side a bit more, I say it is more important to achieve the result which I think we all want to see which is an end to the killing,” he said.

Britain’s response to the events in Gaza was one of the factors behind the radicalisation of British Muslims, Warsi said, citing early evidence from the Home Office. That could have consequences for years to come, she said.

Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband told the BBC: “Cameron needs to come out much more clearly and say Israel’s actions... are just wrong, and can’t be defended and can’t be justified.”

Warsi voiced her support for the people of Gaza in several comments on Twitter over the last month, saying the Palestinians needed a “viable and secure” state. She had called for the killing of civilians to stop.

Speaking in an interview with The Huffington Post after the announcement, Warsi said she “couldn’t sit silently by as the Israeli military committed acts that have been described by [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon as ‘moral outrages’ and ‘criminal acts’”.

In her role as a foreign office minister, Warsi held specific responsibility for government policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Born in northern England, she is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants to Britain and speaks fluent Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati.

BEIT HANOUN, Palestinian Territories — Khayri Hasan Al Masri fled his home in Beit Hanoun with his wife and three children nearly three weeks ago when Israel announced the launch of its July 17 ground offensive.

They left a tidy white house, with its grassy courtyard, a palm tree and a lemon tree.

But when he returned on Tuesday to this small town in northern Gaza as a 72-hour ceasefire took hold, he was confronted by scenes of utter destruction.

“Is this is really my town?” he asks, dumbfounded, gawping at the gutted, collapsed homes.

At the edge of the sandy streets, Israeli tank tracks left their imprint and donkeys lay dead.

The structure of his home is still intact but there are gaping holes in the walls. The bedroom of his 11-year-old son Hasan is covered in cartridges. A mortar lies in the living room, a bazooka upstairs.

A map of the local area has been scrawled on one wall in Hebrew suggesting Israeli soldiers used his home as some kind of base after the family fled.

Khayri returned alone, sparing his immediate family the ordeal of seeing the devastation.

“What am I going to tell my wife and children? I don’t want them to see this! They will go crazy. How can I explain all this?” he sighed, crunching over debris under foot.

“What did we do to him, [Benjamin] Netanyahu?” he asks of Israel’s prime minister.

Khayri is one of thousands of Gazans who used the 72-hour Egyptian-brokered truce, to venture out to see if their homes were still standing.

UN agency OCHA says 267,970 Palestinians have been sheltering in 90 UN-run schools, with thousands more housed in government schools and another 200,000 are believed to be staying with host families.

Widow Zakia Shaban Bakr Masri, 74, her face framed by a headscarf the same green as the lemons hanging in Khayri’s garden, walks with a heavy heart over what remains of her family home.

“As soon as I returned, I cried,” she whispers in a shrill tone.

“All my life savings were here, in my room. I have nothing left.”

Destroy to rebuild 

Mohammed, 22, found similar devastation.

His family’s apartment stands gutted, gaping holes puncturing the walls, the masonry burnt by the fighting. Cockerels wander through the street. A drone sweeps the sky.

“Everything is destroyed. Buildings are no longer habitable. Everything will have to be knocked down to be rebuilt. Until then, we have nowhere to live,” he says.

The Palestinian government is just only starting to count the cost.

“Thousands of homes have been completely destroyed, plus there are all those that were partially damaged,” said Mufid Hasayneh, minister of public works. He wants a conclusive end to the fighting so that painful reconstruction can begin with help from foreign donors.

Palestinian Deputy Economy Minister Taysir Amro told AFP he estimated war damage at $4 to $6 billion, warning the figure could rise as more indirect losses are calculated.

For now, Gazans have a wait-and-see-attitude when it comes to planning reconstruction. They say they will assess the situation, hoping for an end to the nightmare of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Only a handful of the most brave will spend the night camped out among the debris.

Khadar Al Masri has moved a mattress under a concrete slab that threatens to give way at any moment. “It’s dangerous,” he acknowledged.

“I’ll stay here during the truce. If the war resumes, I’ll go back” to a shelter.

“All this is a test from God, but don’t misunderstand: we will pick ourselves up again.”

PARIS — Israel faced growing international condemnation of its operation in Gaza on Monday, with France calling for action over “massacres” in the besieged Palestinian territory after a strike next to a UN school.

As Israel’s operation in Gaza entered its 28th day, the international community appeared to be losing patience with a confrontation the Palestinians say has left more than 1,800 dead.

France led the charge, after the strike on the school sheltering civilians Sunday left 10 people dead and sparked widespread outrage.

“When I see what is happening with the Christians in Iraq, the minorities in Syria, massacres every day. What is happening too in Gaza, massacres ... We have to act,” President Francois Hollande said.

“Europe must be ready ... to take the initiative on the international scene and not think simply that others will do the job for them,” he said on the sidelines of events in Belgium to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius issued one of the most strongly worded condemnations yet from a Western official.

“How many more deaths will it take to stop... the carnage in Gaza?” Fabius said in a statement.

“Israel’s right to security is total, but this right does not justify the killing of children and the slaughter of civilians,” Fabius said.

“A political solution is essential... and should in my opinion be imposed by the international community,” he said.

The strong words from France prompted some to praise Western officials for at last taking a tougher line with Israel.

“Finally! This is very, very good. The systematic targeting of civilians and schools must be denounced,” said Yves Aubin de la Messuziere, a retired French diplomat and expert on the Middle East.

“We should be brave enough to point the finger of blame, of course at Hamas but also at Israel,” he said.

’Very serious’ attack

The United Nations condemned Sunday’s strike at the school, where around 3,000 homeless Palestinians had been sheltering, with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calling the attack “a moral outrage and a criminal act”.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Washington was also “appalled”, demanding a “full and prompt” investigation into the strike — the third time in 10 days a UN school had been hit in the fighting.

The Israeli army acknowledged targeting three Islamic Jihad militants on a motorbike in the “vicinity of an UNRWA school”, saying it was investigating.

Israel declared a seven-hour unilateral truce on Monday, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said its forces did not intentionally hit civilians and apologised for any harm done to them.

But outrage continued to mount.

Spain roundly criticised the strike, with the foreign ministry in a statement calling it a “very serious” attack.

“Spain reiterates its urgent call for strict respect of international humanitarian law and in particular the obligation to avoid hurting the civilian population as well as to respect the inviolability of UN sites,” it added.

“Israel’s armed forces should intensify their efforts to avoid the loss of innocent lives.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron said the United Nations was “right” to condemn the shelling, though he declined to say whether it breached international law.

“The UN has spoken very clearly and I think they’re right to speak very clearly,” Cameron told the BBC.

“International law is clear that it’s completely wrong and illegal to target civilians, if that’s what’s happened.”

Israel’s arch-foe Iran, meanwhile, denounced the “inaction” of the UN Security Council on Gaza, with President Hassan Rouhani accusing the international community of failing “to prevent the crimes against humanity of the Zionist regime”.

GAZA — Glass and debris littered the road to Ahed Marouf’s house in a northern Gaza town on Monday as he rode on a donkey cart with his wife and three children to check on their home during a seven-hour truce declared by Israel.

What they saw when they reached Beit Lahiya, near the Israeli border, persuaded them to return to their temporary shelter in a UN-run school in nearby Jabaliya refugee camp.

“It did not feel safe,” said Marouf, a 30-year-old farmer. “At our house, windows were shattered. There is no electricity and no water.”

Along with thousands of other residents, Marouf and his family fled Beit Lahiya — at Israel’s urging — during fierce battles last week between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants. Israel attacked from the air and ground while militants fired dozens of mortar bombs.

Israel said the brief truce was intended to allow some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by an almost four-week-old war to go home. The Islamist group Hamas, which dominates Gaza, said the one-sided truce was an Israeli media stunt.

On the main road leading to Beit Lahiya, a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings that had housed hundreds of low-income families looked as if it had been peppered by tank fire, seemingly damaged beyond repair.

“Only a permanent ceasefire involving both sides would persuade us to go home to stay. For now, we remain in the UN school,” said Marouf’s wife, Mervat, 23.

She said the war had gone on too long and complained she could not treat her children for flu and stomach pains at local hospitals because they have been overwhelmed by wounded from Israeli bombardments.

In Gaza City, dozens of people lined up outside banks and automatic teller machines to withdraw cash.

Others packed into grocery stores during the ceasefire, which Palestinians accused Israel of violating in a bomb attack they said killed an eight-year-old girl and wounded 29 other people in a Gaza refugee camp.

“Destruction is all over Gaza,” Mervat Marouf said. “We come in sadness. We go in sadness.”

GAZA CITY — Lying on his bed in a Gaza hospital, three-year-old Yamin now sees the world from behind burns which have disfigured him for life.

The tiny boy is just one of hundreds of burn victims and those wounded by Israeli shell fire overwhelming Gaza’s sole working operating theatre for plastic surgeons.

He also has burns on his back and multiple fractures suffered when an Israeli strike decimated his family and destroyed their home in Al Buraj, central Gaza, last week.

It was the evening. The start of Eid Al Fitr, the festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

In a single strike, the house was turned to rubble and 19 people lay dead. Yamin, miraculously, was the sole survivor but he was left an orphan and badly burnt.

He was taken to a clinic then rapidly transferred to the burns department at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza, where he cries, lying naked, and where a handful of surgeons are now confronted with the endless horrors of the war.

Every day ambulances rush in with shattered lives: charred or bloodied humans who will die a few hours later on their stretchers.

The survivors transfer to an operating table, sometimes the modest one in the burns unit, the only one in the whole of Gaza that plastic surgeons can use.

Local medics say 1,829 Palestinians, mostly civilians according to the UN, have died since the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas began on July 8.

At least another 9,000 have been hurt, many seriously.

“There are very few light injuries in this war,” says Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic surgeon from the American University of Beirut, sent a week ago by the Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) organisation to help out in Gaza.

“My feeling is around 70 per cent would have some kind of permanent deformity, either in terms of scarring or in terms of functional deformity... They will never be the same again.”

His worst case? “An 8 year-old boy who basically lost half of his face including one eye and lost the other eye with shrapnel in. What I needed to do is reconstruct the face just to cover the wounds.

“The eyes are lost. He lost all his family, his ability to care for himself has been completely destroyed. There is no future for him, he keeps asking why they have turned the lights off,” Dr Abu Sitta says.

“The size and the magnitude of the carnage that has affected Gaza is beyond the capacity of any health system, let alone a health system that has struggled with eight years of siege,” says the surgeon, who was also in Gaza during Israel’s “Cast Lead” operation at the end of 2008 and start of 2009.

This time the fighting has caused more deaths and more wounded. And worse injuries.

“The fact that we are unable to evacuate patients outside Gaza means that all of these patients are inside the system,” the surgeon says.

Then he turns away to perform a skin graft on a young man with a pierced foot and 10-centimetre  crater on his calf, through which his tibia is visible.

 Hospitals struck 

For the past month, every day brings deliveries of bodies, wounded people and trauma to Gaza’s hospitals.

“We are now looking at a health and humanitarian disaster,” James Rawley, UN humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinian territories, said at the weekend.

A third of hospitals have been hit during the fighting and the violence has prevented nearly half of medical staff from reaching the clinics and health centres that are still standing.

“The current state of the health system is disastrous because the people are exhausted, many hospitals have been affected by the bombardments, and people are afraid to go to hospital,” as sometimes shooting is taking place along their route, says Nicolas Palarus, head of operations in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders.

Palestinian medical staff, the backbone of the local health system, face “stress from the fighting, being far from the family, separated, widespread fatigue, lack of some medicines”, he says.

“From primary healthcare to the big hospitals, the whole chain is disrupted. The system is in a catastrophic state,” Palarus says.

On this day in the burns unit, medical workers paint an antibacterial ointment onto little Yamin, naked, frail and frightened. It will help his skin scar over.

But his cousin and her husband, now his guardians, interrupt. Maybe the best thing for the tiny tot, they say, would be to evacuate him from Gaza. To get him far away from the horrors of the war.

BAGHDAD — It was nearly the perfect heist. In June, Iraq’s Kurds snuck in behind retreating government troops to grab long-coveted land and watched from their new borders as Baghdad and jihadists fought over the rump state.

But the move dragged Kurdistan’s celebrated peshmerga out of their comfort zone and the cash-strapped force is now taking heavy losses along its extended front.

“They’ve bitten a whole chunk of cake that’s going to take a long, long time to digest,” said Toby Dodge, director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics.

The autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq expanded its territory by around 40 per cent when it took the slipstream of soldiers fleeing the onslaught the Islamic State launched on June 9.

Peshmerga troops initially took up positions right in front of Islamic State (IS) territory and seemed determined not to get involved.

One video posted on the Internet shows jihadists and peshmerga on either side of the same bridge, looking quite relaxed.

But over the weekend, IS fighters attacked several of the peshmerga’s new positions west and north of Mosul, killing several and forcing them to withdraw.

A statement the jihadist group issued on Monday appears to confirm that any non-aggression pact is over between the IS and the Kurds.

“Islamic State brigades have now reached the border triangle between Iraq, Syria and Turkey. May God Almighty allow his mujahideen to liberate the whole region,” it said.

Kurdish political commentator Asos Hardi said the IS “is aware that the United States is backing plans for Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish cooperation” against them.

“They are trying to secure the area where the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey meet but that cannot be achieved without trying to expand into Kurdish regions,” he said.

Issam Al Faily, a political scientist from Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University, said the Kurds should not assume that jihadists will not seek to enter their turf.

Dangerous situation 

“Now IS is willing to expand on the land of Kurdistan, if they [the peshmerga] don’t put an end to it quickly, the situation could develop very dangerously,” he said.

The peshmerga are widely regarded as the most able military outfit in Iraq but the financial squeeze caused by their dispute with Baghdad over oil revenue is taking its toll.

That has constrained the Kurdish Regional Government’s ability to pay and equip its troops properly.

“Militarily they’re not capable, trained or funded in a way that would allow them to have control of that extra territory,” Dodge said.

In the town of Jalawla, which sits on the other extreme of the peshmerga stretched frontline, 130 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish troops have taken some of their heaviest losses in recent days.

On several occasions, they fought for hours to hold a position, only to pull back for lack of ammunition.

In a matter on hours on Saturday, the peshmerga abandoned their positions in Zumar, two oil fields, the large town of Sinjar and other smaller towns and positions.

The Syrian Kurdish group PYD that crossed the border to come to their rescue on Monday said it briefly took in 700 peshmerga back into Syria to regroup.

“The peshmerga are well-trained, well-equipped and motivated, but definitely more efficient fighting in defensive positions, on their own terrain, than projecting into the plains of Arab Iraq,” said Peter Harling, from the International Crisis Group think tank.

“Quite simply, they were never meant for that,” he said.

Some analysts argued that the peshmerga did not fight to the death for Mosul’s hinterland because they are pushing for Washington to step in and fill their budget gap.

“The peshmerga withdrawal was also tactical, as a way of pressuring the US to provide them with weapons that they are currently having to buy on the black market,” said Ihsan Al Shammari, a professor at Baghdad University.

Such procurement theoretically requires approval from the federal government in Baghdad but Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki appears to have definitively fallen out of favour with Washington.

GAZA — Reconstruction in Gaza, where heavy Israeli bombardment in a war with Islamist fighters has caused widespread devastation and displaced half a million people, will cost at least $6 billion, the Palestinian deputy prime minister says.

This time, Mohammed Mustafa said, Palestinians hope future donors will make good on aid pledges. In 2009, only a fraction of the nearly $5 billion in funds promised at an international conference after a three-week war between Israel and Gaza’s ruling Hamas actually arrived in the battered enclave.

“Once a ceasefire is reached, we will have to tackle the immediate problem of rehousing those who lost their homes,” Mustafa told Reuters. “According to our estimates, they may number 400,000 people.”

The West Bank-based government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already been in touch with the United States, the European Union, Arab states and the World Bank to hold a donors’ summit after the guns fall silent, Mustafa said.

Qatar, a major ally of the Islamist Hamas might contribute generously to a rebuilding effort. Last year, the wealthy Gulf Arab state began executing construction projects in the Gaza Strip at the cost of more than $400 million.

Contacted by Reuters in Doha, a Qatari official said his country would be ready to provide money for humanitarian aid purposes, but not directly to Hamas itself.

The destruction in the current conflict, now in its fourth week, is more widespread than it was in 2009. Rubble — including from homes and factories that were hit by Israeli shelling, and rebuilt after the fighting five years ago — is strewn in almost every street in towns, villages and refugee camps in the densely packed, sliver-like territory of 1.8 million people.

“There is a need to build 100,000 housing units,” Mustafa said, adding that a Palestinian government committee has begun assessing the damage and the $6 billion figure was only an initial estimate.

Vital infrastructure must also be rebuilt.

Eighty per cent of the population has had electricity for only four hours since Gaza’s only power plant was disabled by two Israeli missiles that struck fuel tanks. According to the British charity Oxfam, two-thirds of Gaza residents have been affected by damage to sewerage and water infrastructure.

Israel has accused Hamas of causing such hardships by launching rockets at its cities from thickly-populated Gaza neighbourhoods, and using mosques and schools as weapons depots, drawing Israeli fire.

After the December 2008-January 2009 war, West governments’ designation of Hamas as a terrorist group over its refusal to recognise Israel or renounce violence, effectively blocked donor funds.

And, citing concerns that Hamas would use reconstruction material to rebuild its military capabilities, Israel clamped severe limits on cement and steel imports into Gaza as part of a security blockade of the coastal enclave.

Those fears, Israel now says, pointing to fighters’ infiltration tunnels unearthed during the current conflict, were justified and could complicate any international efforts to stream building material into Gaza.

Changed political landscape

But the Palestinian political landscape recently changed in a way that could ease the flow of reconstruction aid, especially with Western countries voicing mounting alarm at the scale of physical ruin and civilian casualties.

In April, Hamas — which seized the Gaza Strip in a brief civil war in 2007 — and Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organisation signed a reconciliation deal that led to the formation of a unity government of technocrats.

“Attracting money should be easier now through the unity government. Excuses made in the past by international donors, such as the internal division [of Palestinians], are no longer valid,” said Maher Al Tabbaa of the Gaza Chamber of Commerce.

Abbas has pledged to lobby for support for post-war Gaza and has also been a critical player in ceasefire efforts brokered by the United States, the United Nations and Egypt.

Hamas has made an end to Israel’s blockade and one imposed by Egypt, which regards the Islamist group as a security risk, a pivotal demand in negotiations on a long-term ceasefire.

“We demand that our house be built again. We will build it again and make it even nicer,” said Maher Al Araeer, 45, standing in the rubble of his house in the Shejaia district in Gaza City, where 72 people were killed and hundreds of homes destroyed.

Human rights groups said at least 520,000 people have been displaced by the hostilities. Many have found shelter in UN-run schools, some of which have come under Israeli attack, while others have crammed into relatives’ homes or are living on the street.

When the hostilities end, temporary dwellings may have to be found for tens of thousands until their homes can be rebuilt.

Whether Hamas’s popularity among Gazans will suffer over the shattering impact of the hostilities is still an open question.

Its long-range rocket attacks on Israel’s heartland — most of them intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system — and tunnel infiltrations that have claimed Israeli military casualties have been openly celebrated in Gaza’s streets.

More than 1,790 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting, Gaza health officials say, compared with some 1,400 dead in the 2008-09 war. Israel, which lost 13 dead then, says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed this time in what it terms “Operation Protective Edge”.

TRIPOLI — Libya’s new parliament held its first formal session Monday in the eastern city of Tobruk, as clashes rocked the capital Tripoli and divisions between Islamists and nationalists deepened.

Anti-Islamist MPs insisted on meeting in Tobruk, 1,500km from Tripoli, because of deadly clashes in the capital, some of the worst since the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

State television broadcast footage of the session, showing MPs being sworn in at a ceremony attended by representatives of the Arab League, the United Nations and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

The deputies were to meet again in the evening to elect a speaker, said MP Abu Bakr Biira, who is chairing the session.

Islamist MPs and their allies from the western city of Misrata boycotted the Tobruk ceremony, branding it “anti-constitutional”.

Islamists dominated the outgoing parliament, the General National Congress, and believe that its former chief Nuri Abu Sahmein should have called the meeting of the new assembly.

In a show of defiance, Abu Sahmein invited MPs to Tripoli for a parallel “handover of power” on Monday but the session was later cancelled.

Analysts believe the Islamists are trying to make up for their poor electoral performance by gaining influence through military might.

The United Nations as well as Britain’s ambassador to Libya congratulated the new assembly and voiced hope that lawmakers would be able to restore stability to the oil-rich North African nation.

“The UN Support Mission in Libya [UNSMIL] welcomes the convening of the Council of Representatives amid difficult circumstances for Libya, conditions which call for determination to continue with the political process despite the prevailing challenges,” a statement said.

UNSMIL said it is “hopeful” that the new parliament will take steps to “safeguard the security, safety, unity and sovereignty of Libya” and also called on warring rival militias to observe a ceasefire.

British Ambassador Michael Aron tweeted his felicitations.

“Congratulations to new #Libya Parliament on successful opening in Tobruk today. Hope all Libyans can rally round it & move forward together.”

‘A dark tunnel’ 

MPs said more than 160 of the 188 elected members travelled over the weekend to Tobruk, which so far has been spared by the violence.

The figure, which could not be confirmed independently, would demonstrate a crushing victory by the nationalists over their Islamist rivals in the elections, in which candidates stood as individuals.

Since mid-July, Libya has seen deadly clashes between rival militias in Tripoli, where fighting broke out again on Monday according to an AFP correspondent, and the eastern city of Benghazi.

Tripoli airport has been closed since gunmen, mostly Islamists, attacked it on July 13 in a bid to wrest control from the Zintan brigade of former rebels who have held it since the 2011 revolt.

In a speech at the ceremonial opening of the new parliament, MP Biira urged “those who carry arms to heed reason and wisdom and chose dialogue” over fighting.

UNSMIL chief of delegation Mouin Borhan also addressed Monday’s session, denouncing the fighting which has seen more than 220 people killed in Tripoli and in Benghazi and around 1,000 wounded.

Borhan warned that the fighting could plunge Libya “into a dark tunnel”.

The government has reported that hundreds of families have been displaced by the fighting in Tripoli, which is also reeling from food and fuel shortages and “a worsening humanitarian situation”.

Foreigners have been fleeing Libya in droves, with the exodus gathering pace at the weekend, when Britain and Greece sent ships to evacuate nationals.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said Monday on a visit to Tunis that up to 10,000 Egyptians fleeing the fighting in Libya are still stranded at the border with Tunisia.

The unrest is seen as a struggle for influence, both between regions and political factions, with authorities failing to reign in dozens of militias in the absence of a structured regular army and police force.