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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.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/CAIRO — Israel insisted Monday there will be no end to its bloody military campaign in Gaza without achieving long-term security for its people, shunning increasingly vocal world demands for a truce.

Meanwhile, Egypt is pressing for a 72-hour Gaza ceasefire to be held Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, just hours after Hamas accused Israel of trying to scuttle Cairo truce talks.

Palestinian delegates in Cairo, including members of Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, on Sunday agreed joint demands for a planned truce with Israel, including an end to the Gaza blockade.

“Egypt is leading international efforts for a 72-hour humanitarian truce and a mutual ceasefire starting 8am (0500 GMT) tomorrow,” one of them said Monday.

The delegate  added that all Palestinian factions had accepted the proposal.

Another delegate, Islamic Jihad representative Ziad El Nakhale, told Palestinian radio: “Maybe in the next few hours we will announce a ceasefire.”

Images of the bloodshed in Gaza, which has claimed more than 1,800 Palestinian lives and 67 in Israel, have sent tensions soaring across the region, earning Israel strong criticism for the soaring numbers of civilian casualties.

“How many more deaths will it take to stop what must be called the carnage in Gaza?” asked French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there would be no end without first securing a long-term period of calm for his people.

“The campaign in Gaza is continuing,” he said at the end of a seven-hour humanitarian lull which saw violence subside in the battered Palestinian enclave.

“This operation will only end when quiet and security is established for the citizens of Israel for a prolonged period.”

Violence also erupted in Jerusalem, with Israeli forces saying they had foiled a “terror attack” after a Palestinian rammed an earthmover into a bus, killing one and wounding five before being shot dead himself.

Shortly afterwards, a soldier was shot and badly wounded near a bus stop not far from the site of the earlier attack by a gunman who fled, with Israeli forces combing the area to find him.

Meanwhile on the ground, Israel troops, which had begun withdrawing from besieged enclave at the weekend, largely held their fire in Gaza during a unilateral seven-hour truce, which began at 0700 GMT.

The humanitarian window got off to a shaky start with an air strike levelling a house in a beachfront refugee camp in Gaza City, killing three people, among them a nine-year-old girl, the emergency services said.

The strike cause the house to pancake, leaving a huge pile of rubble strewn with twisted metal rods and broken glass and only a very narrow gap for rescuers to get inside.

“There is no truce. How could there be a truce,” raged Ayman Mahmud, who lives in the neighbourhood.

“They are liars! They don’t even respect their own commitments!”

Hamas did not observe the truce, firing 42 rockets over the border during the pause, 24 of which hit Israel and another one which was shot down, the army said.

And Gaza medics said they retrieved 32 bodies from the rubble.

A military spokesman later said troops were resuming their operations, “including air strikes” but said they were also continuing to redeploy within Gaza while others were pulling out.

Truce follows pressure 

The unilateral truce was announced as international outrage grew over an Israeli strike near a UN school on Sunday that killed 10 people, among them refugees who had been seeking shelter.

It was the third such strike in 10 days.

With UN figures indicating most of the 1,865 people killed in Gaza so far were civilians, the world has stepped up its demands for an end to the bloodshed.

In Paris, France’s top diplomat, an increasingly vocal critic of the war, demanded the world impose a political solution to end “the carnage”.

“Israel’s right to security is total, but this right does not justify the killing of children and the slaughter of civilians,” he said, with French President Francois Hollande urging an end to the “massacres” in Gaza.

Their remarks came a day after the UN denounced a fresh strike on one of its schools which was sheltering 3,000 refugees as “a moral outrage and a criminal act”, and the United States said it was “appalled”.

Israel acknowledged targeting three fighters near the school and said it was investigating the consequences of the strike.

Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov also added his voice to growing calls for an agreement to end the violence, his ministry said Monday.

In Cairo, truce talks between a Palestinian delegation and Egyptian officials were ongoing.

Israel turned down an invitation to attend, with Hamas accusing Israel of attempting to scuttle the talks in a bid to avoid blame for its “escalating massacres” in Gaza.

The Palestinians want Israel withdraw all troops from Gaza, end its eight-year blockade of the enclave and open border crossings.

GAZA/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — An Israeli air strike killed 10 people and wounded about 30 on Sunday in a UN-run school in the southern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian official said, as dozens died in Israeli shelling of the enclave and Hamas fired rockets at Israel.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described the attack as a “moral outrage and a criminal act” and called for those responsible for the “gross violation of international humanitarian law” to be held accountable.

The United States was “appalled by today’s disgraceful shelling” and urged Israel to do more to prevent civilian casualties, according to a statement by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. She also called for an investigation into recent attacks on UN schools.

It was the second strike on a school in less than a week.

The Israeli military said it had “targeted three Islamic Jihad fighters on board a motorcycle in the vicinity of an UNRWA school in Rafah” and added it was “reviewing the consequences of this strike”.

Islamic Jihad did not report any of its fighters killed or injured in the incident. A Palestinian health official said all those wounded or killed were from inside the school.

Amid Hamas accusations that Israel had misled the world about the alleged capture of an Israeli soldier, the officer, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, was buried on Sunday after the military said it recovered remains and he was killed in action.

Goldin’s suspected abduction led to the collapse of a US- and UN-brokered ceasefire on Friday. In Cairo, efforts to find a new truce were due to resume on Sunday.

Troop movements

Israeli media, on the 27th day of the fighting, reported that most Israeli troops had pulled out of Gaza. Reuters TV footage showed a column of Israeli tanks and dozens of infantrymen leaving the enclave.

An Israeli military spokesman stopped short of calling the move a withdrawal, but said residents from some evacuated Gaza neighbourhoods had been told by the army they could return.

“The troops are in the midst of a redeployment to other parts of the border,” said Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner.

“Indeed we are releasing troops from the front line but the mission is ongoing,” he said. “Ground forces are operating. Air forces are operating.”

In the town of Rafah, where the military has been battling fighters, a missile from an Israeli aircraft struck the entrance to the UN-run school, where Palestinians who had fled their homes were sheltering, witnesses and medics said.

Ashraf Al Qidra, spokesman for the Gaza health ministry, said 10 people had been killed and 30 wounded, all from inside the school.

Robert Serry, UN Middle East Special Coordinator, said the school had been sheltering 3,000 displaced persons and the strike caused multiple deaths and injuries.

“It is simply intolerable that another school has come under fire while designated to provide shelter for civilians fleeing the hostilities,” he said.

Last Wednesday, at least 15 Palestinians, who sought refuge in a UN-run school in Jabalya refugee camp, were killed during fighting, and the UN said Israeli artillery had apparently hit the building. The Israeli military said gunmen had fired mortar bombs from near the school and it shot back in response.

Pressure

Earlier on Sunday, Israeli shelling killed at least 30 people in Gaza, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to keep up pressure on Hamas even after the army completes its core mission of destroying a tunnel network used by Palestinian fighters to attack Israel.

Netanyahu says Gaza’s dominant Hamas faction bears ultimate responsibility for civilian casualties, accusing gunmen and rocket-launching squads of using residents in densely populated areas as “human shields”.

In Rafah, Fateh faction leader and local resident Ashraf Goma said locals were unable to deal with the casualties.

“Bodies of the wounded are bleeding in the streets and other corpses are laid on the road with no one able to recover them.

“I saw a man on a donkey cart bringing seven bodies into the hospital. Bodies are being kept in ice-cream refrigerators, in flower and vegetable coolers,” Goma told Reuters.

The Israeli army said that more than 55 rockets had been fired from Gaza at Israel on Sunday. Shrapnel from a rocket shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor fell inside a playground in the Tel Aviv area but caused no injury, media reports said.

Israeli troops had discovered a cache of 150 mortar bombs in the southern Gaza Strip. They had clashed with Palestinian fighters who emerged from a tunnel and with others preparing to launch an anti-tank missile from a house in the area, a military statement said.

Israel began its offensive against Gaza on July 8 following a surge of cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas and other fighters.

The fighting on Sunday pushed the Gaza death toll given by Palestinian officials to 1,775, most of them civilians. Israel has confirmed that 64 soldiers have died in combat, while Palestinian rockets have also killed three civilians in Israel.

Truce efforts

In new truce moves, a delegation from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group arrived in the Egyptian capital, but a quick breakthrough seemed unlikely in the absence of Israeli representatives.

After accusing Hamas of breaching Friday’s short-lived ceasefire, Israel said it would not send envoys as scheduled.

Israel says it wants Gaza demilitarised under any long-term arrangement.

Hamas, sworn to Israel’s destruction, demands Israel withdraw its troops and a lifting of Israeli and Egyptian blockades that have choked Gaza’s economy.

A Palestinian official said Palestinian representatives in Cairo had formulated a joint paper listing those conditions as well as demands for the release of Hamas prisoners held by Israel and the start of a Gaza reconstruction process.

In Gaza, Israel intensified attacks in the area of Rafah along the border with Egypt, where Goldin had been feared captured on Friday. Hamas described Israeli shelling in the town as unjustified retribution for what the group said was a false accusation that the officer had been abducted.

Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said Goldin was a relative of his. “He and other soldiers who fell embarked on the campaign to restore quiet and security to Israel,” he said.

The Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said three dozen tunnels had been unearthed and destroyed and “we are finishing up de-commissioning these tunnels”.

“We hope that that job will be completed in a matter of hours, not days,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.

TRIPOLI — The exodus of foreigners from Libya gathered pace Sunday as the government said at least 22 people were killed in clashes in Tripoli and warned of a “worsening humanitarian situation”.

Thousands of Egyptians seeking to flee the strife-torn North African country were being airlifted home after being allowed into neighbouring Tunisia, many after a wait of several days at a border crossing.

And a British navy ship was evacuating Britons from Tripoli, the defence ministry in London said.

The latest flare-up, which broke out on Saturday, takes the death toll in Tripoli to 124 since July 13, with more than 500 wounded.

A medical source said the weekend casualty figures of 22 dead and 72 wounded did not cover hospitals outside Tripoli, in particular in the town of Misrata which has sent fighters to the capital.

The transitional government said “several hundred” families had been displaced and there was a “worsening humanitarian situation” in Tripoli, where petrol, bottled gas and food supplies are scarce.

On Sunday, the city centre was livelier than in past days despite the renewed fighting around the airport to the south.

However, most shops and banks were shut and the sky was filled with black smoke from a fuel depot ravaged by a fire resulting from the clashes of the past two weeks.

Tripoli airport has been closed and several aircraft destroyed or damaged in the clashes between rival militias which fought together in 2011 to help overthrow dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

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

In Tunisia, buses started on Saturday to pick up Egyptian evacuees at the Ras Jedir border crossing to take them to Jerba airport, 100 kilometres north, for flights back to Egypt, AFP journalists said.

Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Hossam Kamal, said 1,796 people had been taken to Jerba and another 1,355 were to be transferred there on Sunday, with five flights home planned.

As of Saturday evening, about 6,000 people were awaiting evacuation and neither Libya, Egypt nor Tunisia could say on Sunday how many were still awaiting transport.

“The humanitarian situation is critical, as some people haven’t eaten for five or six days,” Red Cross official Mongi Slim told AFP on the phone.

“The authorities have allowed us to provide them with food.”

Tunisia had refused to admit people who were neither Libyan nor Tunisian unless they could prove they would be immediately repatriated and were only transiting the country.

The government said it could not cope with a large number of Arab or Asian workers fleeing Libya as it did during the anti-Qadhafi armed revolt of 2011.

The Ras Jedir crossing was shut on Friday and part of Saturday after violent clashes between Libyan border guards and hundreds of Egyptians who had tried to storm the border post.

On Sunday, the crossing was operating normally.

Since mid-July, Libya has seen deadly clashes been rival militias in both Tripoli and the eastern city of Benghazi.

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

Britain’s defence ministry, meanwhile, said HMS Enterprise, which had been on a Mediterranean deployment, arrived off Tripoli on Sunday.

“A number of passengers were transferred to Enterprise by boat and given supplies for the journey,” it added.

A foreign ministry spokesman said that most of those being evacuated from Tripoli, believed to number around 100, were British.

Britain is also planning to temporarily suspend its embassy operations in the North African country.

Michael Aron, Britain’s ambassador in Tripoli, said Friday he had “reluctantly” decided to leave because of the worsening security situation.

BERLIN — Israel eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during doomed peace talks with the Palestinians last year, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

The article said the Israelis and at least one other secret service listened in on Kerry’s conversations as he tried to mediate, in a development that Der Spiegel said was likely to further strain ties between Israel and the United States.

Kerry regularly spoke by telephone with high-ranking officials throughout the Middle East during the negotiations that finally collapsed earlier this year.

Spiegel, which cited “several sources among secret services”, said that he used not only secure lines but also normal telephones with satellite connections which were vulnerable to tapping.

“The government in Jerusalem used this information in the negotiations on a diplomatic solution in the Middle East,” it said.

Spiegel said Kerry’s office and the Israeli government declined to comment on its report.

Kerry made reviving Middle East diplomacy a central priority at the start of his term and coaxed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas back to the negotiating table in July 2013.

But in April this year, Israel made a surprise announcement of plans for 700 new settlements and refused to free a last batch of Palestinian prisoners after earlier releases. Abbas in turn sought Palestinian membership in 15 UN conventions and the peace drive eventually broke down.

Kerry has attempted to mediate during the current Israeli military offensive in Gaza and flew to Israel last week.

But he has failed to bring about a lasting truce in the 26-day confrontation that has claimed more than 1,700 lives.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of protesters, many wrapped in Palestinian flags, rallied outside the White House on Saturday to call for peace and an end to the fighting in Gaza.

The crowd, young and old from across the United States, including scores of children on parents’ shoulders, chanted “End US Aid to Israel” and “Israel out of Palestine”.

Many wore headscarves or traditional Palestinian keffiyeh scarves.

“Gaza will not die — it will never die,” said Amar Jamal as he marched through downtown Washington with his family surrounded by a sea of red, black, white and green, the colours of the Palestinians’ flag.

“It is the time to make peace because this bloodbath will not stop in Gaza. All the Middle East will be in trouble” if the conflict doesn’t end, warned the Palestinian-born 70-year-old.

‘Stop funding murder’ 

Many of the protesters voiced anger at Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, after he vowed to keep up his military campaign against Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas for as long and as forcefully as needed.

One protester waved a banner that read “Netanyahu and Hitler are the same, the only difference is the name”.

Others demanded that Washington end its military backing of Israel and take its ally to task over a conflict that has already killed more than 1,700 Palestinians and 66 Israelis, all but two of them soldiers.

Shereen Abdel-Nabi, holding her young son who was wearing a “Jesus is Palestinian” T-shirt, said the “US should stop military aid to Israel and use stronger words in condemning its action”.

“I really think this is a turning point ... it’s an issue of humanity. The US government is proving to be on the wrong side of history on this one,” the 34-year-old added.

Remembering the dead 

Sam Khalaf, a Palestinian American from Maryland, felt the need to march to show “solidarity” for relatives in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Marching is the least we can do when people are dying,” said Khalaf, 33.

Friends Waleh Kanan and Jasmine Abuhummos, both 15, travelled for hours overnight from Toledo, Ohio.

“A lot of people are ignorant about what is going on. So we hope this will help get more of the truth out,” said Kanan.

A woman who identified herself as Mary was held back by police as she yelled “stop supporting terror” and brandished an Israeli flag poster towards pro-Palestinian protesters.

CNN reported that a small group of Orthodox Jews held a counter-demonstration that led to a minor scuffle.

Organisers claimed that as many as 50,000 people participated in the afternoon rally.

Police did not immediately respond to requests for official estimates.

Alli McCracken, National Coordinator of the anti-war group CODEPINK, a co-sponsor of the event, said spirits were high “even though there’s a massacre going on”.

Protests were also held in other US cities, including in Los Angeles, where demonstrators lay down on the ground in front of the Israeli Consulate.