Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is another SITEP on the Gaza situation:
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090116.wgaza0116/BNStory/International/home
Gaza fighting slows as Israel counters Hamas offer
NIDAL AL-MUGHRABI
Reuters
January 16, 2009 at 9:21 AM EST
GAZA, Gaza Strip — Israel said its Gaza offensive could be “in the final act” on Friday and sent envoys to discuss truce terms after Hamas made a ceasefire offer to end three weeks of fighting that has killed more than 1,100 Palestinians.
However, Israel rebuffed at least two major elements of the ceasefire terms outlined by the Islamist movement, and fighting continued, albeit with less intensity than on Thursday.
And in Doha, Hamas's exiled leader Khaled Meshaal told Arab leaders his group would not accept Israeli conditions for the ceasefire and would fight on until Israel ended hostilities.
He urged participants at an emergency Arab meeting on Gaza to cut all ties with the Jewish state.
The inauguration of new U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday is seen by some as the time by which Israel will bow to mounting international pressure and call off its attacks.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, touring the region, again said he expected a ceasefire deal within days but urged Israel to stop firing immediately. “It is time now to even think about a unilateral ceasefire,” he said in Ramallah.
At least 13 rockets landed in Israel from Gaza, the army said, slightly wounding one person. Hamas rocket fire has dwindled during the war — which Israel launched on Dec. 27 with the declared aim of crippling Hamas's rocket-firing capacity.
Israeli air strikes killed 10 Palestinians. Among them were guerrillas and civilians, including two children.
“Hopefully we're in the final act,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev said, adding that briefings by the envoys working in Washington and Cairo on Friday could be followed by swift decisions by the security cabinet.
Gazans savoured a relative lull a day after intense combat that some saw as a final Israeli push before a ceasefire.
“The conditions have not come to fruition yet,” security cabinet member Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said. “But this could well happen late on Saturday and we can put this story behind us.”
Israeli planes struck 40 targets in Gaza overnight, but then fighting eased, to the relief of Palestinians stunned by seeing Israeli tanks advancing deep inside Gaza city on Thursday.
Medics taking advantage of a four-hour “humanitarian pause“ said they had recovered 23 bodies on Friday from the previous day's fighting in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in the city's southwest, scene of some of the most intense clashes.
Chanting crowds attended the funeral of a top Hamas leader, Saeed Seyyam, killed in an Israeli air strike along with nine other people. Mr. Seyyam was the interior minister in Gaza's unrecognized government and leader of 13,000 armed security men.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, whose prospects in a Feb. 10 election may have been improved by a war that has so far cost 13 Israeli lives, flew overnight to Washington to sign a security agreement with the outgoing administration of George W. Bush that Israel sees underpinning any truce.
Israeli officials said the agreement would commit the United States to lead a campaign with its NATO allies to track and interdict weapons shipments bound for Gaza from Iran and elsewhere. Preventing Hamas from rearming is Israel's main condition for any truce.
Senior Israeli official Amos Gilad arrived in Cairo again on Friday, this time accompanied by Shalom Turgeman, Mr. Olmert's top diplomatic adviser — a possible sign a deal may be near.
“When we are briefed by Gilad and Livni, there may be a full security cabinet meeting and decisions will stem from that,” Mr. Regev said.
Hamas and diplomatic sources said on Thursday that Hamas had offered a one-year, renewable truce on condition that all Israeli forces withdrew within five to seven days and that all the border crossings with Israel and Egypt would be opened.
Israel wants an open-ended truce and the reinstatement of forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at crossing points into the Gaza Strip, Israeli and Western sources said.
Except for limited humanitarian supplies, the crossings have been all but closed under an Israeli-led blockade since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from Mr. Abbas's forces. Hamas had won a Palestinian parliamentary election the previous year.
Asked about the Israeli demands, Hamas official Ayman Taha told Reuters by telephone from Cairo that they had not been presented to Hamas negotiators, who would meet the Egyptians on Saturday to discuss the Israeli response.
Hamas and Fatah are bitterly at odds, adding to Mr. Abbas's many difficulties in negotiating a peace settlement with Israel that would give Palestinians a state in Gaza and the West Bank.
Fearing that the Gaza crisis would spark violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel imposed sweeping additional controls on movement and flooded Jerusalem's Old City with armed security personnel during Muslim weekly prayers.
Protests erupted in the West Bank city of Hebron, a Hamas stronghold, where Israeli soldiers killed a 17-year-old Palestinian demonstrator and wounded three others, medics said.
Israeli forces have killed some 1,138 people and wounded 5,100 during the Gaza war, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said.
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A unilateral Israeli withdrawal, starting early Tuesday morning, would be a nice inauguration gift to Barack Obama; it would take one big problem off his plate – for a while.
The Israelis can, I think withdraw with near absolute certainty that Hamas (and the Arabs, in general) will fail to exploit the situation. Hamas will not make a ‘peacebuilding’ counter-move – rather it will bluster and fire more rockets, proving to President Obama that Hamas is not, cannot be and does not even want to try to be a ‘partner for peace.’