Hamas Agrees to One-Week Cease-Fire
Posted by John Malloy on 01/18/2009
JERUSALEM (CNN) – Palestinian militants agreed Sunday to a one-week cease-fire against Israel, Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said.
“We in the Palestinian resistance movements announce a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip,” Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official in Syria, said on Syrian TV. “And we demand that Israeli forces withdraw in one week and that they open all the border crossings to permit the entry of humanitarian aid and basic goods for our people in Gaza.”
The agreement covers all Palestinian armed factions, not only Hamas, said CNN Jerusalem correspondent Paula Hancocks.
The two sides had continued to skirmish for several hours after Israel said it was stopping its 22-day offensive against Hamas. More than 1,200 people died in the fighting, all but 13 of them Palestinians. 
Watch how a reporter finds Gaza in chaos »
Olmert said Sunday the Israeli offensive had achieved its goals but that the Israel Defense Forces reserved the right to respond to any Palestinian violence against Israelis.
“IDF forces are in the Gaza Strip and many other units, which are surrounding Gaza, from all sides, are closely observing every corner and listening to every whisper, ready for any response that they might receive from their commanders if and when the violations continue, as they have this morning,” he said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting, before the announcement of the Palestinian cease-fire.
Israel pulled some troops out of the Palestinian territory as it called a halt to its operation against Hamas, but others remain.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told CNN they would be there for a matter of days, not weeks.
Earlier Sunday, militants fired 16 rockets into southern Israel and exchanged gunfire with troops in northern Gaza, an Israeli spokesman said.
The Qassam rockets were fired into Sderot at 9 a.m. — seven hours after Israel’s cease-fire went into effect. The rockets injured one person, and Israeli aircraft destroyed the rocket launcher soon afterward, an Israeli military spokesman said…
www.cnn.com
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For each rocket (which appears to have been as capable of inflicting any damage as ordinary 4th of July firecrackers) the Hamas had fired towards Israel, the IDF had killed 2-3 Palestinians, wounding many more and causing horrific destruction of the physical infrastructure in an already dilapidated territory. To fight with such ineffective weapon against a superbly trained and technologically advanced enemy and invite instant, massive retaliation is not defiance; it is utter suicidal stupidity. For the Hamas leaders who, to save their own own hides, have all fled to the safe havens in Beirut, Damascus or Tehran, to have made fiery speeches from there exhorting their ignorant and gullible henchmen trapped in the Gaza strip to pursue such a senseless path of self-destruction was nothing but cowardice and a criminal act of betrayal. And to claim the unilateral ceasefire declared by Israel after it had inflicted a crushing blow on the Hamas militants (with more to come if the fragile ceasefire is broken) as a victory for the Hamas is nothing but self-delusion of the most heinous kind.
Firecrackers, huh. OK. Then you wouldn’t have any problem with putting your family inside the kill zone of these harmless little rockets. Right? Hamas is run by cowards who use their own people as disposable pawns in order to incite more hatred against Israel. We must remember that Hamas’ goal has always been to provoke wars with Israel and invite retaliatory strikes in which civilian casualties would be unavoidable. Israel was given two choices: sit back and continue to absorb the random killing of its people with these so-called harmless rockets, or go into Gaza and take them out. Because Hamas is a cowardly terrorist organization, it positions its launchers and weapons caches in otherwise peaceful neighborhoods, near hospitals and schools. This is a classic terrorist tactic. If Israel has used a “proportional response” and launched its own missiles into Gaza, rather than invaded the country, it would have suffered no casualties in the conflict and it would have killed thousands of Palestinians. Look at how the two sides conducted themselves during the conflict, and then ask yourself which one was more interested in not killing innocent people. Hamas is run by fanatics who are driven by mindless, generations-old bigotry. An ongoing war with Israel is what gives meaning to their hateful lives. This time, Israel was smart enough to know that you don’t sit down and negotiate a meaningful peace with someone who thinks your country is an “offense to God.”