History > 2014 > USA > International (III)

Palestinians trying to salvage their belongings

from a house destroyed by an overnight Israeli airstrike

in Gaza City on Tuesday.

Khalil Hamra/Associated Press

Israel Steps Up Offensive Against Hamas in Gaza

NYT

JULY 8, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/world/middleeast/israel-steps-up-offensive-against-hamas-in-gaza.html
 

Tensions Escalate Between Israel

and a Second Party in Gaza:

The United Nations

JULY 31, 2014

The New York Times

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

UNITED NATIONS — In the midst of Israel’s battle with militants in Gaza over the past three weeks, skirmishes opened on a second front in recent days: Its strikes on United Nations facilities and the steep civilian casualties brought a barrage of rebukes and warnings from senior United Nations officials around the world, reaching a fever pitch just before the announcement of a cease-fire late Thursday.

Behind the scenes, diplomats here were on the phone incessantly with Israelis, Palestinians and representatives of countries in the region that have influence over Israel’s principal nemesis, Hamas. The efforts led to a 72-hour humanitarian cease-fire announced late Thursday by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman and by Secretary of State John Kerry, who was traveling in New Delhi.

In public, the war of words intensified this week, with the United Nations blaming Israel for an attack that killed at least 19 people who were taking refuge at a United Nations school early Wednesday and Israel, in turn, accusing the world body of helping Hamas.

A look at the increasingly tense relationship between the United Nations and Israel as the violence continues in Gaza.
Video Credit By Quynhanh Do on Publish Date July 31, 2014. Image CreditWissam Nassar for The New York Times

The United Nations has been dragged into the conflict: Eight of its staff members have been killed in the past 24 days, and more than 100 of its facilities have come under fire, including the school. United Nations officials said they had repeatedly told Israel of its exact location.

The deputy secretary general, Jan Eliasson, a former Swedish diplomat, was visibly riled on Wednesday when he publicly reminded Israel of the Geneva Conventions, which established international law governing warfare. In Geneva, the United Nations’ top human rights official, Navi Pillay, raised the prospect of war crimes.

Christopher Gunness, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency spokesman in Gaza, broke down at the end of an interview with Al Jazeera, which promptly went viral. And Pierre Krähenbühl, the commissioner general of Unrwa, the agency responsible for aiding Palestinians, told the Security Council on Thursday that military operations had been “waged with excessive — and at times disproportionate — force in densely populated urban settings.”

Israel has rarely regarded the United Nations as a reliable ally. But the tensions are so acute now that the two are divided even over who has died. The United Nations maintains that 75 to 80 percent of the dead are civilians. Israel angrily rebuts that assertion. Its ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, said as recently as last week that his government had established that about half the dead were combatants.

He mocked United Nations officials who rue the Israeli blockade of Gaza, pointing out that Hamas was using concrete to build “terror tunnels” with construction materials. He has repeatedly taken United Nations officials to task for the discovery of rockets at its schools. On Thursday, speaking to reporters after a Security Council briefing, Mr. Prosor chided the body’s humanitarian relief coordinator, Valerie Amos, for acknowledging that Israel had faced rocket fire, but declining to blame Hamas for it.

“I had problems hearing ‘Hamas,’ ” he said. “I had problems hearing ‘Hamas’ in any briefings from the secretary general downward.” He said the “international community” had been one-sided — in favor of Israel’s enemies. “I feel the international community should be very vocal in standing with Israel fighting terrorism today, because if not you will see it on your doorstep tomorrow,” Mr. Prosor said.

(Ms. Amos did mention Hamas in her briefing to the Council, saying, “Under international humanitarian law, the government of Israel, Hamas and other militant groups must distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects and between combatants and civilians.”)

On the issue of rockets, United Nations officials have taken pains to say that they had been found in buildings they had abandoned for safety, and that it was their staff who had found the weapons and condemned those who stashed them on United Nations premises, which is illegal under international law.

As for the death toll, the United Nations said it collected figures from the Gaza health ministry along with its own staff. Mr. Krähenbühl, who before taking over Unrwa had spent 12 years with the International Committee of the Red Cross, said his own visits to Gaza hospitals this week had convinced him that the vast majority of the dead were civilians: More than 250 of the estimated 1,400 Palestinian dead have been children. He invited skeptics to tour Gaza’s hospitals with him.

Unrwa provides food to about 800,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a sharp increase, it says, since the 2007 blockade, in addition to running schools and clinics. More than 240,000 Gazans are seeking shelter in its buildings.

“We are not an agency with a cause,” Mr. Krähenbühl said. “We are an agency within the U.N. system.”

In addition to his eight colleagues killed in Gaza in the past three weeks, Mr. Krähenbühl said the agency had also lost 12 colleagues in Syria in that country’s three-year war.

In such a polarized part of the world, he said, it was difficult to be “seen as evenhanded.”

It did not start out this way.

When Israel’s military incursion in Gaza began, Mr. Ban made statements condemning Hamas rockets, urging Israel to halt its bombings, and calling on both sides to address what he repeatedly called the “root causes” of their enmity. Even after the bombing of a United Nations school last week, while Mr. Ban was in the region, the United Nations refrained from casting blame. And even now, its officials are careful to call on Israel and Hamas to comply with international laws and, as Mr. Krähenbühl put it Thursday, “to respect the sanctity of U.N. premises.”

Regardless of the verbal volleys, there is little that United Nations officials can do without instructions from the Security Council. The Council met Thursday for more than three hours behind closed doors, but failed to reach consensus on a proposed statement that would have condemned attacks on United Nations installations. Diplomats said they were stuck on language that would have also condemned the use of its facilities to store rockets.

In the past, the United Nations has been useful in supporting political deals and keeping warring parties at bay in the Middle East: One of its first peacekeeping missions was in the Golan Heights. The tensions now may make it far more difficult for the United Nations to play that role.

As the Security Council met behind closed doors, the Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, shoulders hunched, rued that it had not taken any legally binding steps to end the fighting. “There’s a big test for the 15 members in the chamber as they are deliberating right now — I think tests to their hearts, tests to their conscience, tests to their brains — whether they’ll condemn these crimes,” Mr. Mansour said.

Like his Israeli counterpart, he was not too bullish on the international community. He said the people of Gaza “feel the international community is failing them.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 1, 2014,
on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Tensions Escalate Between Israel and a Second Party
in Gaza: The United Nations.

    Tensions Escalate Between Israel and a Second Party in Gaza:
    The United Nations, NYT, 31.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/middleeast/
    tensions-escalate-between-israel-and-united-nations-in-gaza-strip.html

Zionism and Its Discontents

Zionism and Israel’s War with Hamas in Gaza

JULY 29, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Roger Cohen
 

My great-grandfather’s brother, Michael Adler, was a distinguished rabbi who in 1916 compiled the “Prayer Book for Jewish Sailors and Soldiers” at the front during World War I. As “chaplain,” he toured battlefields administering last rites. At the end of the war he asked if British Jews had done their duty.

“Did those British citizens of the House of Israel to whom equality of rights and equality of opportunity were granted by the State some sixty years ago, did these men and women do their duty in the ordeal of battle?” he wrote. “Our answer is a clear and unmistakable YES! English Jews have every reason to be satisfied with the degree of their participation both at home and on the battlefronts in the struggle for victory. Let the memory of our sacred dead — who number over 2,300 — testify to this.”

The question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they French or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the Christian societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them. Theodor Herzl, witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case, wrote “The Jewish State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full acceptance for the Jews would never come.

Herzl was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land. Jews would never again go meekly to the slaughter.

The ravages of European nonacceptance endure. I see within my own family how the disappearance of a Jewish woman grabbed by Nazis on the streets of Krakow in 1941 can devour her descendants. I understand the rage of an Israeli, Naomi Ragen, whose words were forwarded by a cousin: “And I think of the rest of Europe, who rounded up our grandparents and great-grandparents, and relatives — men, women and children — and sent them off to be gassed, no questions asked. And I think: They are now the moral arbiters of the free world? They are telling the descendants of the people they murdered how to behave when other anti-Semites want to kill them?”

Those anti-Semites would be Hamas, raining terror on Israel, whose annihilation they seek. No state, goes the Israeli case, would not respond with force to such provocation. If there are more than 1,000 Palestinian deaths (including 200 children), and more than 50 Israeli deaths, Israel argues, it is the fault of Hamas, for whom Palestinian victims are the most powerful anti-Israeli argument in the court of world opinion.

I am a Zionist because the story of my forebears convinces me that Jews needed the homeland voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, one Arab — in Mandate Palestine. I am a Zionist who believes in the words of Israel’s founding charter of 1948 declaring that the nascent state would be based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”

What I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.

This, as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.

The Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If Benjamin Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause with Palestinian moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He has not. Hamas is vile. I would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is also the product of a situation that Israel has reinforced rather than sought to resolve.

This corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the Zionism in which I still believe.
 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 30, 2014,
in The International New York Times.

    Zionism and Its Discontents, NYT, 29.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/
    roger-cohen-zionism-and-israels-war-with-hamas-in-gaza.html

Even Gaza Truce Is Hard to Win,

Kerry Is Finding

28 July 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — After failing to win a deal to end fighting in Gaza last week, Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to salvage Plan B: a succession of temporary cease-fires that he hopes might yet open the door to Israeli and Palestinian negotiations for a long-term solution.

On Sunday, however, Mr. Kerry was having difficulty accomplishing even that, despite a phone call in which President Obama, in a sign of mounting impatience, urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to embrace an “immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire” while the two sides pursued a more lasting agreement.

Part of the reason the diplomatic effort has faced such an uphill struggle is far-reaching changes on both sides since the last Gaza cease-fire in 2012. Israel and Hamas seem to be dug in this time, with Israeli officials appearing dismissive of Mr. Kerry’s push for a weeklong cease-fire in a way that few American secretaries of state have faced.

Hamas is holding out for a commitment to open major border crossings and ease the embargo after failing to get the benefits it had anticipated after the cease-fire two years ago.

Israel, after encountering a more formidable Hamas tunnel network than it had expected and being struck by longer-range missiles than ever, is determined not to stop until it has neutralized much of the threat.

The challenge of reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable is all the more difficult because there is no party that is in a position to mediate directly between Hamas and Israel. The United States does not deal directly with Hamas. And the countries with the closest ties, Qatar and Turkey, have fraught relations with Egypt, whose cease-fire plan has provided the broad framework for Mr. Kerry’s efforts.

Robert Danin, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official, said that while it was premature to write off Mr. Kerry’s struggle to achieve a cease-fire, the challenges were formidable. “There is nothing to suggest that either side is particularly desperate for a cease-fire,” he said. “Neither side believes a cease-fire will be the end of the conflict, and they are looking at a truce as a way to position themselves for the next round of fighting.”

The behind-the-scenes diplomacy for a cease-fire began two weeks ago when Egypt published a plan that sought to halt the fighting but did not commit to meeting Gaza’s demands that border crossings be opened or prisoners released until the security situation became “stable.”

The Egyptians talked with Israel in developing the plan, calling for an immediate end to hostilities, followed eventually by longer-term discussions on Gaza, but never managed to bring Hamas on board. The United States was informed that Israel thought a round of shuttle diplomacy by Mr. Kerry was not needed or desired, diplomats said.

As the casualties mounted, including the deaths of hundreds of civilians, Mr. Obama decided last week that it was time for Mr. Kerry to go to the region to try to build on the Egyptian plan. From the start, there were signs that the United States and Israel were not on the same wavelength.
Continue reading the main story

On July 21, Mr. Obama declared that the window for a cease-fire was open because “significant damage” had been done to Hamas’s “terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.” But that was not an assessment that the Israeli military fully shared.

After five days of marathon diplomacy in Egypt and Israel, Mr. Kerry presented Mr. Netanyahu with a confidential draft, titled “Framework for Humanitarian Cease-Fire in Gaza.”

A version of the document, which was presented on Friday, stated that a seven-day cease-fire was to be established by Sunday.

Two days later, talks would begin in Cairo between Israel and the Palestinians on achieving an “enduring solution” to the crisis in Gaza, a phrase that Hamas could read as the lifting of the economic embargo and that Mr. Netanyahu could interpret as the neutralization of the group’s military threat to Israel.

The draft, which was obtained by The New York Times, noted that the parties would “refrain from conducting any military or security targeting of each other.” But it did not explicitly call on Israel to stop sealing the tunnels during the humanitarian pause. Those operations have continued during recent cease-fire efforts, creating anger on the Palestinian side.

Humanitarian aid was to be delivered during the pause, and the United States, Turkey, Qatar, the European Union, the Arab League and the United Nations pledged to “address the needs of the people of Gaza.”

Mr. Kerry and his team thought that the document reflected language that could be basically acceptable to Israel because some of it concerning border crossings and security had paralleled the November 2012 Gaza cease-fire and the Egyptian proposal this month.

But rather than treating it as a working draft on which they could comment, American officials assert, the Israelis appeared to think it tilted too far to Hamas’s position and did not do nearly enough to address the security threat to Israel. Major elements of the plan were leaked to the Israeli news media, and there has been a flow of criticism of Mr. Kerry since then by Israeli politicians on both the left and right.

Though American officials insisted that they coordinated their diplomatic moves with Israel, Barak Ravid, a correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz, wrote that Mr. Kerry’s draft “shocked” Israeli cabinet ministers because it “placed Israel and Hamas on the same level.”

At a Friday night news conference in Cairo, a frustrated Mr. Kerry insisted that the paper was never intended to be a “formal proposal” and described the leaks as “mischievous.”

With no seven-day pause at hand, Israel and Hamas agreed to a 12-hour respite and Mr. Kerry raced to Paris. There he met with European foreign ministers to enlist support for a cease-fire, and held a meeting with his Qatari and Turkish counterparts, who were functioning as negotiators for Hamas. The photos of Mr. Kerry meeting with the Qatari and Turkish foreign ministers did nothing to alleviate Israel’s concerns, but American officials say the discussions were needed to try to get Hamas on board.

On Saturday, Mr. Kerry again pressed for an extension of the 12-hour cease-fire. By stringing together enough temporary periods of quiet, he calculated, there might yet be a way for the Israelis and the Palestinians to begin talks on a long-term solution.

The Israeli side initially announced a four-hour cease-fire so that the earlier 12-hour truce would not run out before the Israeli cabinet could deliberate on whether to extend it for another day, which it eventually did. Some American officials believe Hamas saw reports of the four-hour cease-fire as a sign of bad faith since it was not the daylong truce they had been told was on the table. That, and perhaps differences between fighters in Gaza and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas political leader who lives in Qatar, led Hamas to unleash a barrage of fire, which eventually led Israel to respond in kind.

Working through Qatar, Mr. Kerry finally got Hamas on Sunday to announce its 24-hour cease-fire. But the mistrust between Hamas and Israel appeared as deep as ever.

Even as critics complained that Mr. Kerry was on a fool’s errand — trying to salvage even a Gaza truce after failing in a prolonged effort to reach a deeper peace deal that would establish a Palestinian state — the secretary and his team held fast to their plan.

“You have a way now to stanch the bleeding,” one senior State Department official said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Even Gaza Truce Is Hard to Win, Kerry Is Finding.

    Even Gaza Truce Is Hard to Win, Kerry Is Finding, NYT, 28.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/world/middleeast/kerry-finds-even-a-truce-in
    gaza-is-hard-to-win-cease-fire-hamas.html

Israel Says Its Forces

Did Not Kill Palestinians

Sheltering at U.N. School

28 July 2014

The New York Times

By ISABEL KERSHNER

and BEN HUBBARD

JERUSALEM — Israel and Hamas went back and forth on Sunday over proposals for a new cease-fire in the fighting in the Gaza Strip, and Israel sought to bolster its claim that its forces were not responsible for the deaths of 16 Palestinians reportedly killed in an attack on a United Nations school.

Palestinians who brought their dead and wounded relatives to a Gaza hospital after the attack on Thursday said that hundreds of people who sought shelter in the school had gathered in its courtyard, believing that buses were on the way to take them somewhere safer. Then a number of munitions fired by Israeli forces hit the school, they said, killing and wounding scores of people.

The United Nations also reported the attack but said it could not confirm the source.

On Sunday, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, acknowledged that an errant mortar round fired by Israeli troops had exploded in the school’s courtyard that afternoon but said the yard had been empty at the time. He provided a video with 10 seconds of black-and-white footage shot by an Israeli drone that showed a blast in what appeared to be an empty courtyard. “It is extremely unlikely that anyone was killed as a result of that mortar,” he said.

It was not immediately possible to reconcile the accounts.

A visit to the school two days after the attack revealed a small crater from a blast in the courtyard, shrapnel scars on the school walls and large blood spots on the ground near the blast site. Colonel Lerner said the mortar strike shown in the video was the only Israeli ordnance that hit the school that day. The video did not include a time code, but Colonel Lerner said it was shot between 2 and 4 p.m. The United Nations said the attack had taken place at 2:55 p.m.

The diplomatic push for a cease-fire continued as the United Nations Security Council issued a statement early Monday supporting the call for a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. On Sunday, President Obama called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and expressed growing concern about the rising death toll and urged Israel to embrace an immediate truce. Secretary of State John Kerry also kept up his efforts to attain a long-term cease-fire, even as Israel and Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, seesawed on whether to begin a new humanitarian lull in the fighting.

Early Sunday, Israel said its military was resuming its offensive in Gaza because of rocket fire by Hamas during what was supposed to have been a cease-fire from midnight Saturday until midnight Sunday. Huge clouds of smoke from explosions could be seen rising from the eastern neighborhoods of Gaza City near the border with Israel, and ambulances rushed new cases to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

But by afternoon, Hamas had called for a new 24-hour pause, saying it was both responding to a request from the United Nations and because Palestinians were preparing for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, to be observed Monday.

There was no immediate response from Israel, but fighting appeared to slow around Gaza in the evening. The Israeli military said it bombed 40 sites and targeted six militants on Sunday, while Gaza fighters fired scores of rockets into Israel, most of which fell in open areas.

In an interview on the “Fox News Sunday” program, Mr. Netanyahu said, “Israel is not going to let a terrorist organization determine when it’s convenient for them to fire at our — at our cities, at our people, and when it’s not, when they can restock.”

Prof. Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, said that Hamas, too, “feels it cannot accept even a humanitarian cease-fire when it is not the one that sets the time.”

Some Israeli politicians have talked of the possibility of escalating the offensive against Gaza’s militant groups as intense international efforts over the weekend to press for a broader cease-fire appeared to have failed.

More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry and monitoring groups. It said that at least 10 people were killed by Israeli fire on Sunday and that three more had died of injuries.

An Israeli reserve soldier was killed overnight by mortar fire from Gaza, according to the military, bringing the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the beginning of the campaign, on July 8, to 43. Three civilians in Israel have also been killed.
 

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Ben Hubbard from Gaza City. Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza City, Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem, and Somini Sengupta from the United Nations.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Says Its Forces Did Not Kill Palestinians Sheltering at U.N. School.

    Israel Says Its Forces Did Not Kill Palestinians Sheltering at U.N. School,
    NYT, 28.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-strip.html

Gaza’s Mounting Death Toll

JULY 24, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

These days, even a school — clearly identified as a shelter run by the United Nations — cannot protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza from deadly attacks. Located in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, it was struck multiple times on Thursday as people who had taken refuge there were gathering in the courtyard and preparing to flee. At least 16 of them were killed, bringing the total death toll in 17 days of war to more than 750, a vast majority being Palestinian civilians.

There are competing charges over who carried out the attack — Israel; Hamas, which controls Gaza; or one of Hamas’s allies — and that could take time to sort out. What really matters now is that some way be found to stop this carnage.

The war is terrorizing innocent people on both sides of the border, fomenting more hatred, creating an ever larger appetite for vengeance and ensuring that the cycle of violence will be repeated, if not right away then surely at some point in the future. It is past time for an immediate cease-fire and for a political strategy that offers the hope of a more stable future for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Israeli officials say they have taken pains not to harm civilians. They also say they did not target the Beit Hanoun school, suggesting that Hamas may have struck the facility by mistake. Surely, Israel has reason to take strong military action against the barrage of rockets on its territory and to destroy Hamas’s underground tunnels. Yet no one can be indifferent to the fact that innocents are paying an intolerable cost for being caught in the middle.

It is fair to ask whether Israel is doing enough to prevent that. According to a United Nations official in New York, at least 72 United Nations schools, hospitals and offices have been damaged in the fighting, even though they are clearly marked. At the same time, the United Nations did not enhance its own credibility and influence when its Human Rights Council focused entirely on Israel in a resolution on Wednesday, opening an inquiry into possible Gaza-related human rights violations.

Hamas also deserves scrutiny, as well as the strongest possible condemnation for storing and launching rockets in heavily populated areas, knowing full well they would draw Israeli fire to places where civilians live. Unlike Israel, Hamas has not built bomb shelters where civilians can seek refuge. And even as war rages and his people are exposed, Hamas’s political leader, Khaled Meshal, has been safely ensconced at his exile home in Qatar.

Perversely, things seem to be going his way. The Times reported that Hamas, which is committed to Israel’s destruction and was in a weakened political position before the war, is now being hailed among Palestinians in the West Bank as a champion. And, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate, is being faulted for not achieving a Palestinian state in negotiations with Israel.

Israel’s interest would be ill-served if Mr. Abbas ends up being marginalized while the hard-liners are empowered. Any cease-fire should be structured to help strengthen Mr. Abbas’s position.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been working feverishly to get a cease-fire, but his mission is hugely complicated. Meanwhile, the killing goes on.


A version of this editorial appears in print on July 25, 2014,

on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:

Gaza’s Mounting Death Toll.

    Gaza’s Mounting Death Toll, NYT, 24.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/opinion/gazas-mounting-death-toll.html

Blasts Kill 16 Seeking Haven

at Gaza School

 

JULY 24, 2014

The New York Times

By BEN HUBBARD

and JODI RUDOREN

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — For more than a week, as the war engulfed their homes, families in this northern Gaza town packed up their belongings and children and headed to the one place they presumed would remain safe: the United Nations school.

But in the last few days, the war approached there as well. The Israeli military warned on Monday that the shelter should be evacuated. By Thursday, the United Nations had decided to withdraw its staff and to stop providing food.

Then, as the Palestinians gathered in the courtyard on Thursday, believing they were about to be bused elsewhere, blasts tore through the crowd, killing 16 people and sending scores of wounded, mostly women and children, streaming into local hospitals.

The source of the blasts was unclear, setting off recriminations between Israelis and Palestinians over which side was responsible. People in the school reported three to five blasts and accused Israel of shelling them. Israel suggested that rockets fired by militants might have fallen short of their targets or that the school might have been hit with errant shells from either side in fighting nearby. The United Nations said it could not confirm the source of the blasts.

A United Nations school that had sheltered Palestinians who fled their homes for safety from Israeli military assaults was struck on Thursday.
Video Credit By Reuters on Publish Date July 24, 2014. Image CreditOliver Weiken/European Pressphoto Agency

The explosions came on the 17th day of an increasingly bloody conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants that has killed nearly 800 people in Gaza. On the Israeli side, 32 soldiers and three civilians have been killed. This was the fourth time that United Nations schools had been struck.

The blasts in Beit Hanoun highlighted the desperate search by Gaza civilians for refuge. It also came as Secretary of State John Kerry was pushing intensively to achieve a cease-fire. One proposal under discussion, according to an official involved, was for a seven-day pause that could begin on Sunday.

“We went to the school to be safe,” said Mohammed Shinbary, kneeling on the floor of a hospital here and cradling his wounded 7-year-old daughter Aya. “And then they hit the school.”

This particular school is run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as Unrwa, which provides services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East. But Gaza’s unique makeup gives Unrwa an outsize role in the small, coastal enclave.

More than 70 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million people are registered refugees, most of them descended from Palestinians who fled or were forced to leave their homes during the war over Israel’s creation in 1948.

The extensive services Unrwa provides in Gaza give it a status similar to that of a government. It runs hundreds of schools and medical centers, oversees infrastructure projects and provides regular food aid to about half the population. It is Gaza’s second largest employer and has remained as governments and occupations have come and gone for more than 60 years.

“We are the only constant in Gaza,” said Robert Turner, Unrwa’s director for Gaza.

Gazans call it simply “the agency.”

It is this long relationship, Mr. Turner said, that has led 150,000 Gazans — more than 8 percent of the population — to seek refuge from the war in Unrwa’s schools.

The attack on Thursday came after both the United Nations and Israel realized that those sheltering in the school were in danger but before they could be moved elsewhere.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said Israel had asked the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday to evacuate the school because both Palestinian militants and the Israeli Army were active nearby. Word came on Thursday that an evacuation was being prepared, he said, but the school was hit soon after.

Colonel Lerner said Israeli troops did not aim at the school but that fighting was raging nearby and several rockets launched at Israel had fallen short and landed in the area. “There was combat there, and we have to determine whether it has anything to do with us,” he said.

Mr. Turner of the United Nations said his office had told Israel that hundreds of people were sheltering in the school and provided its coordinates — 12 times — most recently at 10:56 a.m. Thursday. He said that it was the only shelter in Beit Hanoun where the agency was still providing services, after others had been deemed too dangerous, and that the Israeli warnings had made the United Nations decide to withdraw its staff and tell the Gazans it was no longer safe.

Mr. Turner said the United Nations had not confirmed the source of the blasts. He added that in the earlier instances when schools had been hit, he was “certain” that Israel was responsible.

But an Israeli official who coordinates with international organizations said this week that he had provided military commanders with coordinates of 523 sensitive sites to avoid. He showed reporters a graphic with dates and times of rockets being launched from several such sites — including a mosque, a hospital and a playground — in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City.

“It’s easy to blame us. ‘Why are you hitting that hospital?’ Why not blame them? Why are you launching from those sensitive places?” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under military rules.

Jacques De Maio, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation for Israel and the Occupied Territories, called the situation in Beit Hanoun a “conundrum” where “you have civilians and military targets that are simply too close to each other.”

He denied that the Red Cross had been involved in any planned evacuation.

Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza and is leading the fight for the Palestinians, accused Israel of striking the school, calling it “an ugly war crime.”

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, who was in the region this week to try to advance cease-fire efforts and met with Mr. Kerry, said in a statement that he was “appalled” by the school attack.

“Many have been killed, including women and children, as well as U.N. staff,” he said, adding that United Nations staff had been trying throughout the day to arrange a pause in the hostilities so that civilians could be evacuated.

For those inside the school, the blasts punctuated days of steadily declining conditions.

As doctors scrambled to treat the scores of patients who flooded into the hospital closest to the blast, the wounded and their relatives pondered how they had lost so much in a place they had expected to be safe.

All denied that there had been Hamas fighters in the area.

“If the resistance had come to us, we would have died a long time ago,” said Bilal Nassir, suggesting that the presence of militant groups would have brought an earlier Israeli assault. “We had no resistance at all in the area.”

In a hospital hallway, Amina Nassir stood over a single hospital gurney holding two of her daughters: Fatima, 13, who had lost a chunk of flesh from her leg, and Aya, 12, who had broken her right shoulder and had shrapnel wounds in both legs. A third daughter had also been wounded.

Ms. Nassir said shelling near her home had caused her family to flee to the school eight days before. Many other families had come too, packing the classrooms, and as time went on, the shelling got closer and food and water grew scarce.

On Thursday, word came that buses were coming to transport everyone to a safer school, she said, so they gathered their things and collected in the courtyard where they sat when the blasts struck.

Like other survivors, she said there had been no Hamas fighters in area and seemed shocked that her family had been harmed inside the school.

“I don’t know where we can go now,” Ms. Nassir said. “We can’t go home, and the schools are unsafe.”

Ben Hubbard reported from Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Fares Akram from Gaza, Somini Sengupta from the United Nations, and Michael R. Gordon from Cairo.

A version of this article appears in print on July 25, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Blasts Kill 16 Seeking Haven at Gaza School.

    Blasts Kill 16 Seeking Haven at Gaza School, NYT, 24.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/world/middleeast/
    despite-talk-of-a-cease-fire-no-lull-in-gaza-fighting.html

Darkness Falls on Gaza

Gaza Under Israel’s Onslaught

 

JULY 22, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By MOHAMMED OMER

GAZA CITY

RAMADAN, when night descends, is usually a joyous time. Friends and family gather to break their fast at the iftar meal. Not this year.

Nights are the worst. That is when the bombing escalates. Nowhere is safe. Not a mosque. Not a church. Not a school, or even a hospital. All are potential targets.

On Monday, the Israeli military fired artillery rounds at Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, claiming to target a cache of anti-tank missiles. Dr. Khalil Khattab, a surgeon, was operating on a patient when the first shell struck. He ran to the floors below to discover at least four dead and dozens of colleagues — doctors, nurses, orderlies and administrators — injured. The medical staff had become patients.

The Gaza Strip — a little less than half the size of New York City — is home to 1.8 million people, mainly Muslims, with a small Christian minority. Its population is cut off from the world, living under the blockade imposed by Egypt and Israel in 2007. For anyone over the age of 7, this is the third time they’ve lived through a sustained attack.

In two weeks of bombing and shelling, more than 600 Palestinians have been reported killed. Since the Israeli ground invasion began, 28 Israeli soldiers have died; the conflict has also claimed the lives of two Israeli civilians.

Here in Gaza City, the electricity was gone; it was dark everywhere. The water supply was foul, food was rancid, and fear permeated the summer night.

On Eighth Street, I visited the al-Baba family. For this family of 15, a corrugated tin roof was all that stood between them and the bombs. Hani al-Baba, 23, heard the hum of a drone. Some are for surveillance, some are weaponized. Which is which, one never knows. The sound was enough to send the children scurrying into corners, trembling and praying. Nervously, Hani scanned the night sky.

Israeli strikes have taken out entire families. In a town near Khan Younis on Sunday, more than 20 members of the Abu Jameh family died when their home was hit. For safety, Hani’s father split the family into different rooms — a scene played out in nearly every home in Gaza, a grim shell game of family members.

Suddenly, a bomb exploded in the field behind the al-Babas’ house: a boom followed by a flash of light. Everyone screamed. The ground shook, the air seemed to implode, sucking the breath from lungs.

Then it was dark again. Why this area was being bombed was unclear. There were no “terrorists,” no rockets. It was a neighborhood of families, scared and cowering in the dark.

The long siege has bled the Gaza Strip dry. There is no money for public services; the majority of the population lives in abject poverty. And now at least 120,000 Gazans have been displaced by the fighting, thousands taking temporary shelter in United Nations schools. Many will return to homes damaged or destroyed, with little or no means to rebuild. Cement is especially severely rationed because Israel suspects it is diverted by Hamas to build tunnels for fighters.

In Shifa Hospital, what struck me were the resilience and dignity of the families. Forced to evacuate under gunfire, they had become refugees in their own land. I watched a grandmother who’d fled the east of the city comforting her four grandchildren and two daughters. The family broke their fast with slices of bread, two yogurts, cucumber and tomatoes. This was their iftar.

A cease-fire agreement is possible, but all parties need to be at the table; Hamas was not consulted over the one proposed by Egypt last week. Even peace might be possible — if the international community has the courage to engage in dialogue with Hamas. The terms outlined by Hamas for a cease-fire are the same as those the United Nations has called for repeatedly: open the border crossings; let people work, study and build the economy. A population capable of taking care of its own would enhance Israel’s security. One that cannot leads to desperation.

In January 2008, barriers along the Gaza-Egypt border were knocked down. Thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt to acquire much needed supplies. I remember the relief within the Palestinian community. This transient glimpse of freedom was a treat.

A neighbor of mine was simply delighted to drink a Coca-Cola. The freedom to move, fresh food and clean water, and the simple pleasure of sipping a soda, this is what Gazans need: the normal life everyone else takes for granted. During the first days the border was open, Hamas suspended rocket attacks from Gaza. Israeli politicians should take note.

Whatever its official statements, Israel has no interest in destroying Hamas; it seeks merely to weaken and isolate it. Hamas gives Israel an out, a convenient villain, someone to blame. Yet the siege of Gaza serves no purpose other than to radicalize the next generation.

Families like the al-Babas shouldn’t have to move their children around the house in the hope that some may survive. Nor should families in Ashdod, over the border in Israel, have to hide in bomb shelters from the militants’ rockets.

Without a process that includes all parties at the negotiating table, though, I fear this cycle of violence, punitive and disproportionate as it is, can lead only to an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria-type extremism among the Palestinians. Only the darkest cynic would wish for that.
 

Mohammed Omer is a reporter for The Washington Report
on Middle East Affairs and other publications.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 23, 2014,
on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Darkness Falls on Gaza.

    Darkness Falls on Gaza, NYT, 22.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/opinion/gaza-under-israels-onslaught.html

Questions About Tactics and Targets

as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes

 

JULY 21, 2014

The new York Times

By ANNE BARNARD

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza — The blast from the Israeli strike was so powerful that it threw an iron door clear over several neighboring houses. It came to rest along with a twisted laundry rack still laden on Monday with singed clothes and a child’s slipper.

When the strike leveled a four-story house in the southern Gaza Strip the night before, it also killed 25 members of four family households — including 19 children — gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast together. Relatives said it also killed a guest of the family, identified by an Israeli human rights group as a member of the Hamas military wing, ostensibly Israel’s target.

The attack was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes that have killed families in their homes, during an offensive that Israel says is meant to stop militant rocket fire that targets its civilians and destroy Hamas’s tunnel network.
Continue reading the main story

The Palestinian deaths — 75 percent of them civilians, according to a United Nations count — have prompted a wave of international outrage, and are raising questions about Israel’s stated dedication to protecting civilians.

Israel blames Hamas, saying they have chosen to keep operating among civilians.

On Monday night, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said that he had not yet been able to confirm the circumstances of the attack here or who the target might have been. Colonel Lerner would not address questions about whether the target would have been considered worth so many additional deaths.

But while Israel has in the past killed Hamas members with attacks so precise that others riding in their cars have survived, in this conflict, there have been numerous instances of family homes being struck with residents inside. More and more Palestinians are accusing Israel of trying to inflict maximum suffering to demoralize Palestinians and weaken support for Hamas.

On July 13, 18 family members were killed in an airstrike on their home, and Tayseer al-Batsh, the Hamas police chief in Gaza, was severely wounded. Many other civilians have been killed in strikes on known Hamas offices or apartments that happened to be in their apartment buildings, and in strikes on homes with no obvious connection, Palestinian officials and residents say.

On Monday night, a strike hit an eight-story apartment building in downtown Gaza City — an area where Israeli officials had urged Gazans to take shelter. The building collapsed as rescue crews were inside, killing more people. The death toll, at least 13, was still being tallied.

Speaking in general, a senior Israeli military official said in a recent interview that not all civilian casualties come from strikes going astray; some take place when civilians are in places the military aims to hit.

“Not all the casualties are due to mistakes,” he said. “If Hamas are holding people inside the apartments while shooting from there, that’s one of the tragedies they are making.”

That did not appear to be the situation at the Abu Jameh home, where, survivors said, the family was gathered to break its daily Ramadan fast, a ceremonial meal, a time when Israeli military officials would have known that people were likely to be home.

All the dead were from the Abu Jameh family, according to relatives, except for a guest, whom the Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, identified as Ahmad Suliman Sahmoud, a member of Hamas’s military wing, who was visiting a member of the family.

Family members said that no one residing in the house was a Hamas militant. But they said that one resident, Tawfik Abu Jameh, was a bodyguard for an official in charge of Gaza’s border crossings. He escaped the bombing, having gone to pray, but lost his wife and all but one of his children.

Some members of Gaza’s security forces are former members of Hamas’s militant Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

Bassem Naim, who served as health minister in a former Hamas government in Gaza, noted in an interview on Monday that the international community had encouraged Palestinian militants to become part of the official security forces, with the idea that it would moderate some. Now, he said, if former Hamas fighters can be targeted when they are in their homes with families, then so can the majority of Israeli adults who are army reservists.

“They are trying to punish Palestinians for sharing Hamas’s position against Israeli occupation,” he said.

While not everyone in Gaza supports Hamas — the territory has been perennially rived by factional disputes with Fatah, a faction more disposed toward negotiation with Israel — the group is deeply embedded in Gazan society. Those considered its members range from militants in the Qassam Brigades to members of the political wing, government workers or police officers.

Of those who lived in the house, only four people survived, three men who had gone to pray, and Tawfik Abu Jameh’s toddler, shielded by the body of his mother. The children killed ranged in age from 4 months to 14 years, and included an adopted orphan whose father had been killed in an Israeli strike.

One of the survivors, Bassam Abu Jameh, lay on a mat with a broken leg, his eyes rimmed with red. His wife, Yasmeen; two brothers; and three children, Batool, 5, Sohaila, 3, and Bassam, 1, had all been killed. “There is nothing left,” he said, pressing his hand to his eyes. “It is the end for us.”

He closed his eyes, lying still and letting his neighbors continue the account. After a while, he opened them again and announced, in a shaky voice: “I will marry again four times, and I will have 10 sons with each wife, and they will all be in the resistance.”

On Monday, the neighborhood was ghostly quiet. Most residents had fled, and where the home had been was a deep bomb crater and piles of rubble.

At the house next door, a little girl, seeing journalists approach in flak jackets, sat on a stoop, put her face in her hands and wept.

Correction: July 22, 2014

An earlier version of this article incorrectly included the Hamas police chief in Gaza as among those killed in an airstrike on a home in Gaza on July 13. While 18 people were killed, the police chief, Tayseer al-Batsh, was not among them, though he was severely wounded.

 

Fares Akram contributed reporting from Khan Younis
and Gaza City, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem.

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2014,
on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Questions About Tactics and Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs
in Israeli Strikes.

    Questions About Tactics and Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes,
    NYT, 21.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/world/middleeast/
    questions-about-tactics-and-targets-as-civilian-toll-climbs-in-israeli-strikes.html

Neighborhood Ravaged

on Deadliest Day So Far

for Both Sides in Gaza

 

JULY 20, 2014

The New York Times

By ANNE BARNARD

and ISABEL KERSHNER

GAZA CITY — The mayhem began in the early hours of Sunday morning in Shejaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, where Israeli forces battled with Hamas militants. Terrified civilians fled, sometimes past the bodies of those struck down in earlier artillery barrages. By dusk it was clear that Sunday was the deadliest single day for the Palestinians in the latest conflict and the deadliest for the Israeli military in years.

At least 60 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers and officers were killed in Shejaiya alone, and the shattered neighborhood was quickly becoming a new symbol of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, underlining the rising cost of this newest Gaza war.

The death tolls and the withering assault on Shejaiya appeared to shake the international community, with world leaders continuing to carefully call for both sides to step back but with criticism of Israel rising. Within hours, President Obama had called the Israeli prime minister for the second time in three days, the United Nations Security Council had called an emergency session at the urging of the Palestinians, and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had issued a statement calling the attack on Shejaiya “an atrocious action.”

By early evening, the Obama administration announced that Secretary of State John Kerry would head to Cairo to meet with Egyptian officials in an attempt to negotiate a cease-fire to end the bloodshed.

Throughout Gaza, at least 87 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire on Sunday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, bringing the death toll there since the Israeli air offensive began on July 8 to at least 425, with more than 3,000 injured. The toll includes more than 100 children.

Israel has lost 18 soldiers so far, as well as two citizens killed by rocket and mortar fire. Two Americans were among the soldiers killed in Gaza; Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, identified them as Max Steinberg and Sean Carmeli. Mr. Steinberg’s family lives in California, and Mr. Carmeli was from Texas, The Associated Press reported.

In Shejaiya, the panic Sunday was palpable. Some of the men, women and children who streamed out of the area were barefoot. Israeli shells crashed all around, rockets fired by Palestinian militants soared overhead in the direction of Israel and small-arms fire whizzed past. Asked where they were going, one woman said, “God knows.”

The casualties quickly overwhelmed local hospitals. Doctors treated some victims on the floor.

As the day wore on and the casualties mounted, it became apparent that what had begun on Thursday night as a limited ground invasion to follow 10 days of intense airstrikes had developed into a more extensive and dangerous phase for both sides.

Late Sunday, Hamas’s military wing announced it had captured an Israeli soldier, though the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, said, “There is no kidnapped Israeli soldier,” adding, “Those rumors are untrue.”

Despite the growing international alarm, Israel’s political and military leaders said that while acknowledging the pain for both sides, they were determined to continue with their mission. They have said the offensive is meant to root out Hamas’s vast network of underground tunnels, many of them leading into Israel, and to quell the rocket fire from Gaza, which continued on Sunday.

In a televised prime-time address to the nation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We are not deterred,” adding, “We will continue to operate as long as necessary.”

Mr. Netanyahu said he had “laid the diplomatic foundation that has given us international credit to operate,” listing major Western countries that he said understood Israel’s right to defend itself.

In another sign that the conflict could continue to take a high toll, a senior Israeli military official noted that the Hamas fighters Israel faced in Shejaiya had “learned lessons” from past conflicts and were tough adversaries. “I have to admit that we were facing good fighters on the other side,” he said.

So far, Mr. Netanyahu appears to have the support of many Israelis, who were particularly shaken in recent days when militants used what the government had warned were “terror tunnels” to infiltrate their country.

It is unclear how much support Israel will receive abroad if the bombardment continues. Last week, Mr. Obama reaffirmed his “strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself,” but suggested that it was based on his understanding that “the current military ground operations are designed to deal with the tunnels.”

On Sunday, he again backed Israel’s right to self-defense, but also raised “serious concern about the growing number of casualties,” according to a statement released by the White House.

A look at why Israel and Hamas have repeatedly chosen to intensify the violence at every stage of the continuing conflict.
Video Credit By Mona El-Naggar on Publish Date July 17, 2014. Image CreditRonen Zvulun/Reuters

Mr. Kerry, who used his appearances on the talk shows to vociferously defend Israel’s right to take action, expressed his own consternation in private critical comments that were captured by Fox News on a live microphone. Mr. Kerry is heard to say to an aide: “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” adding, “We got to get over there.”

His later answers to on-air questions suggested that he had been speaking sarcastically of an operation that is aimed at militants but had killed so many Palestinian civilians, including many children. He is expected to arrive in Egypt on Monday.

Late Sunday night, diplomats on the Security Council called for an “immediate cessation of hostilities” in brief remarks to the news media, falling far short of the resolution that Palestinians had hoped for.

Mr. Ban called on Israel to halt its operation in Gaza immediately, saying, “Israel must exercise maximum restraint and do far more to protect civilians.” He also called for an end to the rocket fire from Gaza.

Mr. Ban spoke in Doha, Qatar, hours before a scheduled meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas called the Israeli action in Shejaiya “a crime against humanity,” according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.

Like other Israeli officials, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, noted that ground forces moved into Shejaiya after area residents had been warned to leave for days. But some residents have said they are unsure where they could go to be safe in the small, densely populated enclave.

Colonel Lerner said Hamas had “fortified” the whole neighborhood not far from the border with Israel, building a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the houses, which he called “Lower Gaza.” The fighting started about 1 a.m. and lasted about seven hours. Colonel Lerner said the Hamas fighters were armed with antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons.

As the battle waned, the horror unfolded. Dark smoke rose at the edge of Shejaiya, and shelling cracked and thumped nearby with just a few seconds’ pause between rounds. Clusters of people periodically emerged from the narrower streets and rushed up the hill toward downtown.

A chain of five children holding hands trotted uphill, dragged by an adult — the smallest boy, around 3, with an expression of confusion and terror. Barefoot, he clutched his flip-flops in his hand. Taxis ventured only to the bottom of the street, where they picked up pedestrians, so many on occasion that some had to sit in an open hatchback or trunk. In the chaos, many parents were separated from their children.

At Shifa Hospital, a girl who looked about 9 was brought into the emergency room and laid on a gurney, blood soaking the shoulder of her shirt. Motionless and barely alive, she stared at the ceiling, her mouth open. There was no relative with her to give her name. The medical staff stood quietly around her. Every now and then, they checked her vital signs, until it was time. They covered her with a white sheet, and she was gone. A few moments later, a new patient lay on the gurney.

The hospital grounds were crowded with displaced families sitting on the grass. Taghreed Harazin, 34, sat under a gazebo with her 6-month-old son, Diaa, in the car seat in which she had carried him on foot until finding a taxi. She said she had believed the evacuation order was only for the eastern part of the neighborhood, and mistakenly thought she would be safe at home. Moving was frightening, she said, because of airstrikes.

But during the night, heavy shelling started. They went to the basement for three hours, then ventured out at dawn.

As the family dashed through the streets to avoid crashing shells, Ms. Harazin, said, she saw the decapitated body of a boy who looked about 4.

“We are not Hamas, and we are not with the others,” Ms. Harazin said. “We just want to live in our homes.”
 

Asked what she thought of Hamas’s handling of the current war, she said, “Sometimes it’s difficult to express your opinion.” She said her husband had been beaten for complaining about Hamas.

Wadha Abu Amr, 62, said her family were refugees from what is now Beersheba, who fled in 1948 during the war over Israel’s founding.

“I’m afraid that this is another 1948,” she said, “God forbid. We were driven out in 1948 and we are being driven out again now.”

In the worst-hit area, a cinder-block building had been flattened; a neighboring one was only partially standing and others across the street were burned. On side streets, glass and rubble littered the ground, and the walls were pocked with shrapnel marks. Workers tried to pull bodies from rubble.

Several men appeared to be fighters, emerging from a hole broken in a concrete wall and shooing photographers away.

The remains of an exploded ambulance littered one street, the engine blown away from the ripped body of the vehicle. During the fighting, a Palestinian journalist who had ridden with an ambulance crew into the neighborhood was killed, along with a paramedic, whose body lay on a stretcher at Shifa Hospital, still in green scrubs.

In Israel, the mood was grim but determined. The military, suffering its heaviest loss in a single day since the 2006 war in Lebanon, said seven of the 13 soldiers were killed when militants detonated an explosive device against their armored personnel carrier, three died in clashes with militants and three died trapped in a burning building.

The senior military official, who briefed reporters in Tel Aviv and spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with army rules, said the forces faced hundreds of Hamas fighters.

“It was a real battle there,” he said. “They were hiding in the apartments, shooting at the Israeli soldiers from the apartments, from the houses, from the windows.”
 

Anne Barnard reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram and Tyler Hicks from Gaza, Jodi Rudoren from Tel Aviv, Michael R. Gordon from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Neighborhood Ravaged on Deadliest Day So Far for Both Sides in Gaza.

    Neighborhood Ravaged on Deadliest Day So Far for Both Sides in Gaza,
    NYT, 21.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/world/middleeast/gaza-israel.html

U.S. Drone Kills 15 Militants in Pakistan

 

JULY 19, 2014

The New York Times

By ISMAIL KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Fifteen militants were killed early Saturday morning when an American drone struck a compound in the Pakistani tribal region of North Waziristan, according to local residents and a security official. It was the fourth known drone strike in the region since Pakistan launched a military operation there last month.

Residents said the drone fired four missiles into the compound about 2 a.m. They said that 10 of the militants killed were from Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, and that the five others were Uzbeks affiliated with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The strike occurred in the village of Datta Khel, a few miles from the Afghan border.

A security official gave a slightly different account, saying that six missiles had been fired at the compound, and that two vehicles loaded with explosives had been struck. “There are tents and there are mud houses, occupied by militants fleeing Miram Shah and Mir Ali,” the official said, describing the compound and referring to two nearby towns that have been hubs of jihadist activity. The army says it has cleared Miram Shah of militants, and a ground offensive is continuing in Mir Ali.

Most of those killed in the strike on Saturday were Taliban from Punjab, the official said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media.

The Pakistani military, which began its operation in North Waziristan on June 15, says it has lost 26 men in the fighting, including two officers. It estimates that 400 militants have been killed.

Violence has also escalated elsewhere. Late Friday night, militants killed eight paramilitary security personnel in an attack on a vehicle in the town of Jamrud in the Khyber tribal region, near the city of Peshawar. “These are the people who have fled the operation in North Waziristan and have taken shelter here,” a senior government official said, referring to the extremists. Four police officers in Peshawar were also killed in attacks by militants on Friday.

    U.S. Drone Kills 15 Militants in Pakistan, NYT, 19.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/asia/
    15-militants-are-reported-killed-in-us-drone-strike-in-pakistan.html

Israel’s War in Gaza

 

JULY 18, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

After 10 days of aerial bombardment, Israel sent tanks and ground troops into Gaza to keep Hamas from pummeling Israeli cities with rockets and carrying out terrorist attacks via underground tunnels. The tragedy is that innocent civilians on both sides of the border are paying the price, once again, and that military action will not guarantee long-term stability or peace.

There was no way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tolerate the Hamas bombardments, which are indiscriminately lobbed at Israeli population centers. Nor should he. As President Obama said on Friday, “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders, or terrorists tunneling into its territory.”

Well over 1,000 rockets have fallen on Israel since July 8, and they have reached farther than ever, threatening Tel Aviv and beyond. Only two Israelis have died (a civilian was killed by mortar shells from Gaza as he distributed food to soldiers near the border on Tuesday, and an Israeli soldier may have been killed by friendly fire at the start of the ground offensive), but Israeli citizens are running for cover from incoming rockets. Hamas can’t defeat Israelis, so it tries to terrorize them.

Innocent Palestinians are being killed and brutalized: four Palestinians boys playing on a beach; four children playing on a rooftop; a rehabilitation hospital, all destroyed by Israeli firepower. The United Nations says that of the more than 260 Palestinians killed, three-quarters were civilians, including more than 50 children.

Hamas leaders deserve condemnation for storing and launching rockets in heavily populated areas, cynically knowing they will draw Israeli fire to places where civilians live and play. Still, in a call with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Obama was right to express concern about the “risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life.”

Military action, however, is not a long-term solution, as Israeli operations in 2012 and 2008-9 showed. Israel seized Gaza in 1967 and withdrew in 2005. It is hard to see how re-occupation would serve Israel’s interests.

The best solution remains a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, headed by the Fatah faction, which operates in the West Bank. (Hamas runs Gaza, where 1.7 million Palestinians live.) American-mediated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority failed in April. After that, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, reached a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, which has lost support in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. That moment could have been a chance to erode Hamas’s political standing further and boost Palestinian moderates like Mr. Abbas.

The agreement created a government that had no Hamas members, reaffirmed the Palestinian Authority’s longstanding commitment to living in peace with Israel, and would have given the authority a foothold in Gaza. But Israel opposed the reconciliation agreement and, according to Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group, the United States and Europe undermined it, which led to the current crisis.

Without a political strategy, another cease-fire may be the most anyone can hope for at this moment. But Hamas leaders have rejected one proposed in the past week by Egypt and are demanding better terms. Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians suffer the consequences.

A version of this editorial appears in print on July 19, 2014,

on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:

Israel’s War in Gaza.

    Israel’s War in Gaza, NYT, 18.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/opinion/Israels-War-in-Gaza.html

U.S. Sees Evidence

of Russian Links to Jet’s Downing

 

JULY 18, 2014

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER, MICHAEL R. GORDON

and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The United States government has concluded that the passenger jet felled over Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile launched from rebel-held territory and most likely provided by Russia to pro-Moscow separatists, officials said on Friday.

While American officials are still investigating the chain of events leading to the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Thursday, they pointed to a series of indicators of Russian involvement. Among other things, military and intelligence officials said there was mounting evidence that a Ukrainian military plane shot down three days earlier had been fired upon from inside Russian territory by the same sort of missile battery used to bring down the civilian jet.

The intelligence persuaded President Obama to publicly lay responsibility at least indirectly at the door of the Kremlin. Speaking at the White House, he tried to channel international indignation toward Russia for what he called an “outrage of unspeakable proportions.” Mr. Obama said the episode should be “a wake-up call for Europe” and “should snap everybody’s heads to attention” about what is going on in Ukraine, where a pro-Russia insurgency has become an international crisis.

Without going into detail about the intelligence he had been shown, Mr. Obama said that the separatists had been armed and trained “because of Russian support.” High-flying aircraft cannot be shot down without sophisticated equipment and training, he added, “and that is coming from Russia.”

He singled out President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, accusing him of waging a proxy war that led to the tragedy. “He has the most control over that situation,” Mr. Obama said, “and so far, at least, he has not exercised it.”

Russia denied involvement and suggested that Ukraine’s military might have been responsible, an assertion Ukraine rejected. Mr. Putin called for talks, saying: “All sides to the conflict must swiftly halt fighting and begin peace negotiations. It is with great concern and sadness that we are watching what is happening in eastern Ukraine. It’s awful; it’s a tragedy.”

As investigators tried to sort out control of the crash site in the middle of a war zone and families mourned the victims, the global revulsion at the downing of the plane grew, particularly with the news that a number of AIDS researchers were among the dead. European leaders joined Mr. Obama in calling for an international investigation unimpeded by combatants, and Ukraine asked the United Nations civil aviation authority to lead an investigation.

While separatists guarding the crash site allowed some Ukrainian government rescue teams to enter and begin collecting bodies on Friday, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the armed rebels had prevented its monitors from gaining full access to the site in order to secure a safe route for the investigation and salvaging operations.

One rebel even fired into the air as the monitors were leaving, according to a spokesman for the organization, Michael Bociurkiw, who was there. Mr. Bociurkiw said bodies in the field were beginning to bloat. A separatist leader said that the governments of the Netherlands and Malaysia had asked the rebels informally not to disturb the crime scene, but that there were not enough refrigerators to keep the bodies there.

Among the 298 people who died when the plane came down was Quinn Lucas Schansman, 19, who was born in New York to a Dutch father and had dual American and Dutch citizenship. Mr. Schansman had been studying in Amsterdam when he decided to fly to Indonesia, where his family was on a three-week vacation. “He was headed over there to meet them,” said Katinka Wallace, a relative.

Mr. Schansman’s Facebook page indicated that he had moved to Amsterdam on April 24 and had been in a relationship with a young woman since last year. His favorite quotation was “I have a dream!” On Friday, friends and relatives posted remembrances in Dutch. “Dear cousin and friend, we’re going to miss you,” one wrote.

American intelligence agencies concluded that the Boeing 777-200 was struck by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from a rebel-controlled area near the border in Ukraine. American analysts were focused on an area near the small towns of Snizhne and Torez, about midway between the rebel strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Their determination was based on an analysis of the launch plume and trajectory of the missile, as detected by an American military spy satellite. But the analysis did not pinpoint the origin of the missile launch or identify who launched it. “Those are the million-dollar questions,” said a senior Pentagon official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss details of the analysis.

Although the separatists claimed to have captured a Ukrainian SA-11 battery in late June, a senior American official said the system was not believed to be operational. “We have high confidence that it was not a Ukrainian system,” the official said of the battery that shot down the Malaysian plane. “We have reason to suspect that it could be a Russian-supplied system.”

The downing of the Ukrainian military transport plane on Monday figured prominently in the evaluations. Western officials said there were strong indications that the missile that struck that plane, an Antonov-26, came from the Russian side of the border, although the crash is still under investigation.

It was not clear whether the same missile battery brought down the Malaysian aircraft on Thursday, but officials said that either way, they believed the unit had been transported over the border from Russia in recent days. The Ukrainian government released audio in which separatist rebels seemed to be discussing an SA-11 missile system that was moved into eastern Ukraine from Russia just before the Malaysian plane was destroyed.

American officials said that while they had not authenticated the tape, they had no reason to doubt it, and noted that the accents of the speakers and the scenario described seemed to fit existing information.

In recent months, Russians have funneled tanks, rockets, artillery and antiaircraft weapons to the separatists, according to American and European officials. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the top NATO commander, warned last month that the Russians had trained separatists to operate some of the heavy weaponry, although he did not mention SA-11 missiles specifically.

At a briefing on Friday, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the top Pentagon spokesman, said it would have been difficult for separatists to fire the SA-11 without Russian help. “It strains credulity to think that it could be used by separatists without at least some measure of Russian support and technical assistance,” he said.

Admiral Kirby raised the possibility that the Russian military had transported the system into Ukraine and even fired it. “Whether it was a system that was driven across the border by Russians and then handed off, we don’t know,” he said.

Separatist leaders on Friday denied taking down the Malaysian plane, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, dismissed Ukraine’s accusations of Russian involvement. “In the last few months, I have not heard practically any truthful statements from Kiev,” he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said at least five Ukrainian air defense systems were within range to bring down the plane. It said the flight path and crash site were within two areas where Ukraine was operating a long-range S-200 air defense system, and where three squadrons were deployed with SA-11 missile batteries.

Ukraine denied that any of its forces had been involved, and American officials said they believed that denial. “The Boeing was outside the zone of possible destruction by the antiaircraft forces of Ukraine,” Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told reporters.

After months of trying to gently prod European allies to take tougher action against Moscow for its intervention in Ukraine, Mr. Obama decided to raise the diplomatic temperature on Friday on both Russia and American allies. He sent his United Nations ambassador, Samantha Power, to the Security Council to describe what she called “credible evidence” that the separatists were responsible. Ms. Power said she could not “rule out technical assistance by Russian personnel.”

Mr. Obama then went before the cameras himself at the White House to argue that whatever the investigation found, Russia’s aid to the insurgents had led to the disaster. “What we do know is that the violence that’s taking place there is facilitated in part, in large part, because of Russian support,” he said.

He said Europe should pay attention, noting that most of the passengers were Europeans, including 189 from the Netherlands. “That, I think, sadly brings home the degree to which the stakes are high for Europe, not simply for the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Obama said, “and that we have to be firm in our resolve.”

He later called Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to talk about the disaster. He also spoke with Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia, which had 27 passengers on board, and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke with President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine.

In their own public statements, European leaders expressed outrage but showed little eagerness to escalate the confrontation with Russia. Mr. Cameron, whose country had nine citizens on board, said “those responsible must be brought to account.” Ms. Merkel, whose country had four passengers on board, said there were “many indications” that the Malaysian airliner had been “shot down” but declined to say whether she would support tougher sanctions.

Reporting was contributed by David M. Herszenhorn from Kiev, Ukraine; Neil MacFarquhar from Moscow; Sabrina Tavernise from Grabovo, Ukraine; Ian Lovett from Los Angeles; Somini Sengupta at the United Nations; Melissa Eddy from Berlin; Alan Cowell from London; James Kanter from Brussels; Dan Bilefsky from Paris; and Michael S. Schmidt, Eric Schmitt, Michael D. Shear and Julie Davis from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. SEES EVIDENCE OF RUSSIAN LINKS TO JET’S DOWNING.

    U.S. Sees Evidence of Russian Links to Jet’s Downing, NYT, 18.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/
    malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html

Jetliner Explodes Over Ukraine;

Struck by Missile, Officials Say

 

JULY 17, 2014

The New York Times

By SABRINA TAVERNISE,

ERIC SCHMITT and RICK GLADSTONE

GRABOVO, Ukraine — A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people aboard exploded, crashed and burned on a flowered wheat field Thursday in a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, blown out of the sky at 33,000 feet by what Ukrainian and American officials described as a Russian-made antiaircraft missile.

Ukraine accused the separatists of carrying out what it called a terrorist attack. American intelligence and military officials said the plane had been destroyed by a Russian SA-series missile, based on surveillance satellite data that showed the final trajectory and impact of the missile but not its point of origin.

There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, blamed Ukraine’s government for creating what he called conditions for insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where separatists have bragged about shooting down at least three Ukrainian military aircraft. But Mr. Putin did not specifically deny that a Russian-made weapon had felled the Malaysian jetliner.

Whatever the cause, the news of the crashed plane, with a passenger manifest that spanned at least nine countries, elevated the insurgency into a new international crisis. The day before, the United States had slapped new sanctions on Russia for its support of the pro-Kremlin insurgency, which has brought East-West relations to their lowest point in many years.

Making the crash even more of a shock, it was the second time within months that Malaysia Airlines had suffered a mass-casualty flight disaster with international intrigue — and with the same model plane, a Boeing 777-200ER.

The government of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, is still reeling from the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370 over the Indian Ocean in March. Mr. Najib said he was stupefied at the news of Flight 17, which had been bound for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, from Amsterdam with 283 passengers, including three infants, and 15 crew members. Aviation officials said the plane had been traveling an approved and heavily trafficked route over eastern Ukraine, about 20 miles from the Russia border, when it vanished from radar screens with no distress signal.

“This is a tragic day in what has already been a tragic year for Malaysia,” Mr. Najib told reporters in a televised statement from Kuala Lumpur. “If it transpires that the plane was indeed shot down, we insist that the perpetrators must swiftly be brought to justice.”

Mr. Najib said he had spoken with the leaders of Ukraine and the Netherlands, who promised their cooperation. He also said that he had spoken with President Obama, and that “he and I both agreed that the investigation must not be hindered in any way.” The remark seemed to point to concerns about evidence tampering at the crash site, which is in an area controlled by pro-Russia insurgents.

Ukraine released what it said was audio of phone calls between rebels and Russian officers. In one call, a rebel is heard saying, “We have just shot down a plane.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin also spoke about the disaster and the broader Ukraine crisis, White House officials said, and Mr. Putin expressed his condolences. But in a statement quoted by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, Mr. Putin said, “This tragedy would not have happened if there was peace in the country, if military operations had not resumed in the southeast of Ukraine.”

The United Nations Security Council scheduled a meeting on the Ukraine crisis for Friday morning.

Adding to Ukrainian and Western suspicions that pro-Russia separatists were culpable, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the State Security Service, known as the S.B.U., released audio from what it said were intercepted phone calls between separatist rebels and Russian military intelligence officers on Thursday. In the audio, the separatists appeared to acknowledge shooting down a civilian plane.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent reporters a link to the edited audio of the calls, with English subtitles, posted on YouTube by the S.B.U.

According to a translation of the Russian audio by the English-language Kyiv Post, the recording begins with a separatist commander, identified as Igor Bezler, telling a Russian military intelligence official, “We have just shot down a plane.”

In another call, a man who seems to be at the scene of the crash says that a group of Cossack militiamen shot down the plane. He adds that it was a passenger jet and that the debris contains no sign of military equipment. Asked if there are any weapons, he says: “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medical equipment, towels, toilet paper.”

Asked if there are any documents among the debris, the man says, “Yes, of one Indonesian student.”

Myroslava Petsa, a Ukrainian journalist in Kiev, said that the people in the audio sounded shocked by what they had found in the wreckage.

By Thursday night, American intelligence analysts were increasingly focused on a theory that rebels had used a Russian-made SA-11 surface-to-air missile system to shoot down the aircraft and operated on their own fire-control radar, outside the checks and balances of the national Ukrainian air-defense network.

“Everything we have, and it is not much, says separatists,” a senior Pentagon official said. “That said, there’s still a lot of conjecture.”

Russian troops, who have been deployed along the border with eastern Ukraine, have similar SA-11 systems, as well as larger weapons known as SA-20s, Pentagon officials said.

Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, said he had called the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, to express his condolences and to invite Dutch experts to assist in the investigation. “I would like to note that we are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act,” Mr. Poroshenko said.

Reporters arriving at the scene near the town of Grabovo described dozens of lifeless bodies strewn about, many intact, in a field dotted with purple flowers, and remnants of the plane scattered across a road lined with fire engines and emergency vehicles. “It fell down in pieces,” one rescue worker said as tents were set up to gather the dead. The carcass of the plane was still smoldering, and rescue workers moved through the dark field with flashlights.

For months, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of a violent pro-Russia separatist uprising. Rebels have claimed responsibility for attacking a Ukrainian military jet as it landed in the city of Luhansk on June 14, and for felling an AN-26 transport plane on Monday and an SU-25 fighter jet on Wednesday. But this would be the first commercial airline disaster to result from the hostilities.

Despite the turmoil, the commercial airspace over eastern Ukraine is heavily trafficked and has remained open. Questions are likely to be raised in the coming days about why the traffic line, which is controlled by Ukraine and Russia, was not closed earlier.

With the news of the crash on Thursday, Ukraine declared the eastern part of the country a no-fly zone. American and European carriers rerouted their flights, and Aeroflot, Russia’s national carrier, announced that it had suspended all flights to Ukraine for at least three days. The conspicuous exception was Aeroflot flights to Crimea, the southern peninsula that Russia annexed in March, a pivotal point in the Ukraine crisis.

It was unclear late Thursday whether any Americans had been aboard the flight. Russia’s Interfax news agency said there had been no Russians aboard.

In Amsterdam, a Malaysia Airlines official, Huib Gorter, said the plane had carried 154 Dutch passengers; 45 Malaysians, including the crew; and 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Belgians, four Germans, three Filipinos and one Canadian. The rest of the passengers had not been identified.

Prof. David Cooper, director of the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said that a prominent AIDS researcher traveling to the 20th International AIDS conference in Melbourne was among those on the flight.

Professor Cooper, who was heading to the conference from Sydney, said he was unaware how many other passengers were also on their way to the conference, which is scheduled to start on Sunday.

Andrei Purgin, deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an insurgent group in eastern Ukraine, denied in a telephone interview that the rebels had anything to do with the crash. He said that they had shot down Ukrainian planes before but that their antiaircraft weapons could reach only to around 4,000 meters, far below the cruising level of passenger jets.

“We don’t have the technical ability to hit a plane at that height,” Mr. Purgin said.

Mr. Purgin did not rule out the possibility that Ukrainian forces themselves had shot down the plane. “Remember the Black Sea plane disaster,” he said, referring to the 2001 crash of a Siberia Airlines passenger jet, bound for Novosibirsk from Tel Aviv, that the Ukrainians shot down by accident during a military training exercise.

In comments broadcast on Ukrainian television, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, said the crash illustrated the threat to peace in Europe posed by the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “This is not just a local conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, but a full-scale war in the center of Europe,” he said. “I’m certain the international community this time will pay attention and understand.”

Correction: July 17, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Ukraine’s president. He is Petro O. Poroshenko, not Poroschenko. An earlier version also misstated the title of Najib Razak. He is the prime minister, not president, of Malaysia. The article had also misstated the direction a Siberian Airlines passenger jet was flying before it was shot down by Ukraine in 2001. It was flying from Israel, not to it.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Grabovo, Ukraine, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar, David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow; Noah Sneider from Grabovo; Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker from Washington; Thomas Erdbrink from Amsterdam; C. J. Chivers from the United States; Michelle Innis from Sydney, Australia; and Masha Goncharova and Robert Mackey from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Jetliner Explodes Over Ukraine; Struck by Missile, Officials Say.

    Jetliner Explodes Over Ukraine; Struck by Missile, Officials Say,
    NYT, 17.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/
    europe/malaysian-airlines-plane-ukraine.html

Israeli Military Invades Gaza,

With Sights Set on Hamas Operations

 

JULY 17, 2014

The New York Times

By JODI RUDOREN

and ANNE BARNARD

JERUSALEM — Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday night and naval gunboats pounded targets in the south as Israel began a ground invasion after 10 days of aerial bombardment failed to stop Palestinian militants from showering Israeli cities with rockets.

Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.

As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.”

As midnight approached Thursday, residents of some sparsely populated farmland in northern Gaza were cowering in their homes, afraid to answer mobile phones or peek out windows. Some sent text messages reporting that they could hear tank shelling, heavy artillery, and F-16s dropping bombs. Moussa al-Ghoul, 63, who lives northwest of Beit Lahiya, said his neighborhood had turned into “a war zone” with tanks surrounding his home, having destroyed those of two of his sons. He said shells were landing “everywhere.”

Gaza news outlets reported that electricity had been cut to 80 percent of the coastal territory after cables bringing power from Israel were damaged.

After the early-morning tunnel episode, the day settled into an extended calm as both sides observed a United Nations request for a five-hour humanitarian pause in the fighting. But by 3 p.m., the violence roared back as the Palestinian death toll neared 250 and more than 120 rockets rained on cities throughout southern and central Israel all afternoon and evening.

“We will strike Hamas and we are determined to restore peace to the state of Israel,” the military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, told reporters in a conference call. “It will progress according to the situation assessment and according to our crafted and designed plan of action to enable us to carry out this mission.”

Israel began to call up 18,000 reservists, adding to 50,000 already mobilized in recent days; Colonel Lerner said the ground forces would include infantry and artillery units, armored and engineer corps, supported by Israel’s “vast intelligence capabilities,” air force and navy.

Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, called the invasion “a dangerous step.”

Areas where the Israel Defense Forces dropped leaflets urging Gaza residents to leave their homes before the ground assault. Arrows indicate where they were told to go.

“The occupation will pay its price expensively,” he said in a statement, referring to Israel, “and Hamas is ready for confrontation.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not make a public statement Thursday night, but several of his ministers said on television that a unanimous cabinet had authorized Mr. Netanyahu and the defense minister a few days ago to send in ground troops when they deemed necessary.
Continue reading the main story

“With a heavy heart we embarked on this operation, in order to destroy the tunnels, as just this morning we have seen their deadly potential,” said Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party. “Difficult days are ahead of us,” he added. “We are also operating against the rockets and all of the existing threats, but the No. 1 target is the tunnels.”

Israel did not send ground troops into Gaza during eight days of cross border violence in 2012. It was condemned internationally for an intense three-week air-and-ground campaign in 2008-9, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed along with 13 Israelis in fierce street fighting. Israel originally seized the territory in the 1967 war and evacuated its settlers and soldiers in 2005, but maintained restrictions on imports, exports and travel for the Palestinians left behind.

The military operation started about 10 p.m., hours after Israel bombed a rehabilitation hospital and another airstrike killed four children playing on a Gaza City rooftop — an echo of the previous day’s bombing that left four young children, all cousins, dead on a beach.
Photo
Israeli tanks moved along the border with Gaza on Thursday. Israel warned residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to Gaza City. Its Navy also shelled areas near the Gaza City seaport. Credit Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

At the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, most but not all of the 17 patients and 25 doctors and nurses were evacuated before the electricity was cut and heavy bombardments nearly destroyed the building, doctors said.

“We evacuated them under fire,” said Dr. Ali Abu Ryala, a hospital spokesman. “Nurses and doctors had to carry the patients on their backs, some of them falling off the stairway. There is an unprecedented state of panic in the hospital.”

Along the Gaza City seafront, as tanks entered the north, there was a near-constant staccato of gunboats firing in bursts of five blasts each, sending flashes above the dark water. They were shelling a target south of Gaza’s port, the red lights of their barrels visible from shore, the impact of their artillery echoing a second later.

Earlier, warplanes whooshed over the city as they have for more than a week, and the high-pitched hum of drones could be heard over the call to prayer from mosques to end the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“Communications with Gaza have become problematic” since the ground invasion, said a statement from Christopher Gunness of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides health care, education, and other services for more than half of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents who are classified as Palestinian refugees. The agency is currently sheltering thousands who evacuated their homes. “We urgently appeal for restraint so that civilians who have suffered enough in this appalling conflict do not suffer further,” Mr. Gunness said.

Brig. Gen. Moti Almoz, chief spokesman of Israel’s military, said on television, “I will now, uncharacteristically, ask the residents of Gaza to move away from the areas our forces are operating in — they are operating with extreme force.”

The United Nations estimates that about three-quarters of those killed so far were civilians, not militants, and about 50 of those were children. Palestinian health officials said at least 17 children died in airstrikes on Wednesday and Thursday, raising sharp new questions about civilian deaths.

Relatives collapsed in grief around sunset at Shifa Hospital, where the four children who had been killed on the rooftop — twin brothers Jihad and Wissam Shuheiber, 8; their cousin Afnan, 10; and a friend, Yassin Al-Himidi, 4 — were laid on a single table in the morgue, their bodies deceptively intact. One of the boys wore only his underpants, decorated with superheroes.

The military declined to offer an explanation for the strike on the rooftop. On Wednesday, after an earlier Israeli strike killed four children on the beach, the military said it aimed to kill Hamas militants and called the civilian deaths a “tragic outcome,” but did not provide details of why it hit a simple shack on the beach and fired again as the children fled. Israeli officials say that they take precautions to avoid hitting civilians but that Hamas makes it hard by firing rockets from residential areas and discouraging residents from evacuating their homes.

“We don’t need statements of regret from Israel,” Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said in a Twitter message. “We need investigation and an end to the killing.”

It had been a roller-coaster day, starting with Israel’s early-morning report that it had foiled the attack through the tunnel at about 4:30 a.m. by striking from the air at 13 Palestinians who emerged from it and tried to infiltrate a kibbutz, the first time that had happened in the current conflagration. Colonel Lerner said later that the incursion “illustrates the clear and immediate threat we have from the Gaza Strip,” and noted that Israel had uncovered four similar tunnels into its territory over the last 18 months.

The humanitarian pause urged by the United Nations started at 10 a.m., and Gaza residents filled the streets, shopping for food and toys and crowding cash machines open for the first time since the operation began. But the lull was pierced around noon by a brief flurry of mortars fired from Gaza, with rockets fired toward Israel precisely at 3 p.m., the designated endpoint of the lull. The strikes continued through the afternoon and evening.

Israel shot down a drone near Ashkelon, not far from its border with Gaza, the second unmanned aerial vehicle sent aloft by Gaza this week.

At one point, there was word from Egypt that an agreement had been reached for a cease-fire starting at 6 a.m. Friday. Instead, the violence only increased.

“We have to look at this as an operation in stages: its first stage was attacks from the air and sea, and this is the second stage, where we reach contact with the Hamas,” Eli Marom, commander of Israel’s Navy from 2007 to 2011, said on Israel’s Channel 2 News. “You have to understand this is a long campaign. This is only its second stage, and there can be other stages.”

Michael B. Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, said in a late-night interview that Mr. Netanyahu had “exercised extraordinary restraint up until now” by not engaging ground troops and “paid a heavy political price for it.” Thursday’s tunnel attack, he said, “was a game changer,” adding, “Essentially, Hamas invaded Israel first.”

In contrast to the Iron Dome missile-defense system that Israel says has stopped some 300 rockets from hitting populated areas over the last 10 days, Mr. Oren said, “We don’t have a response to the tunnels.”

He added, “They are reinforced concrete tunnels, basically impregnable from the air and their openings are camouflaged.”

Amos Yadlin, director of Israel’s Institution for National Security Studies and former chief of military intelligence, similarly said in a radio interview earlier Thursday that the tunnel attack “clarified to those who were still wondering if it was right to conduct a ground move against certain points.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem, and Anne Barnard from Gaza. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner, Gabby Sobelman and Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem, and Fares Akram from Gaza.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israeli Military Invades Gaza, With Sights Set on Hamas Operations.

    Israeli Military Invades Gaza, With Sights Set on Hamas Operations,
    NYT, 17.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-strip.html

Four Horrific Killings

Can Israeli and Palestinian Leaders
End the Revenge Attacks?

 

JULY 7, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

In the space of a few weeks, the brutal killings of four teenagers — one Palestinian and three Israelis — have inflamed tensions in Israel and the occupied territories, potentially igniting a conflict that could be even more vicious than the intifadas of 1987 and 2000. It is the responsibility of leaders on both sides to try and calm the volatile emotions that once again threaten both peoples.

The hostilities and recriminations began with the kidnapping and murder last month of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank: Eyal Yifrach, 19; Naftali Fraenkel, 16; and Gilad Shaar, 16. Last week, the body of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian teenager, was found beaten and burned in a forest.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, after days of near silence, condemned that killing and promised that anyone found guilty would “face the full weight of the law.” Israeli officials said the murder seemed to be a revenge attack for the killing of the three Israeli teenagers. In the sweep to find those teenagers, six Palestinians were killed in confrontations with Israeli forces and about 400 Palestinians were arrested, many of them affiliated with Hamas, which Israel accused of the murders. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, also after a delay, denounced the abductions and vowed to help catch the kidnappers. Two suspects said to have ties to Hamas have since been arrested.

After the attack on the Israeli teenagers, some Israelis gave in to their worst prejudices. During funerals for the boys, hundreds of extreme right-wing protesters blocked roads in Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs.” A Facebook page named “People of Israel Demand Revenge” gathered 35,000 “likes” before being taken down; a blogger gave prominence to a photo, also on Facebook, that featured a sign saying: “Hating Arabs is not racism, it’s values.” Even Mr. Netanyahu referenced an Israeli poem that reads: “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.” Israelis have long had to cope with Hamas’s violence, including a recent increase in rocket attacks from Gaza. And Palestinians have been fully guilty of hateful speech against Jews.

In an atmosphere in which each side dehumanizes the other, it shouldn’t be surprising that some people would act on extremist views. According to news reports, the suspects arrested in Mr. Khdeir’s murder may be fans of a soccer club known for its anti-Arab rhetoric. Commentators in the Israeli news media have been frank in analyzing the killings, especially that of Mr. Khdeir, and their effect on society. Self-criticism is a strength of democracies. An editorial in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, said prosecuting Mr. Khdeir’s murderers is not by itself sufficient. The country’s leaders “must begin raising the next generation, at least, on humanist values, and foster a tolerant public discourse.”

Despite the pain and anger, there have been gestures of compassion and understanding. Mr. Khdeir’s grieving father made an appeal for “both sides to stop the bloodshed.” On Sunday, the uncle of Naftali Fraenkel offered his condolences in a phone call with Mr. Khdeir’s father. President Shimon Peres and Reuven Rivlin, who is succeeding Mr. Peres later this month, wrote in a joint essay in Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper, that there would be no cover-up in the investigation of Mr. Khdeir’s murder and called for an end to incitement on both sides.

These deaths should cause the two communities to think again about the need for a permanent peace, but the loss of four young men may not be motivation enough.


A version of this editorial appears in print on July 8, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Four Horrific Killings.

    Four Horrific Killings, NYT, 7.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/opinion/
    can-israeli-and-palestinian-leaders-end-the-revenge-attacks.html

Power Struggles in Middle East

Exploit Islam’s Ancient Sectarian Rift

 

JULY 5, 2014

The New York Times

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Middle East | News Analysis
 

RIFFA, Bahrain — Black and yellow concrete barricades block the roads entering this wealthy Sunni enclave, where foreign-born Sunni soldiers in armored personnel carriers guard the mansions of the ruling family and the business elite.

Beyond the enclave are impoverished villages of Shiites, about 70 percent of Bahrain’s more than 650,000 citizens, where the police skirmish nightly with young men wielding rocks and, increasingly, improvised weapons like homemade guns that use fire extinguishers to shoot rebar.

Their battles are an extension of sectarian hostilities nearly as old as Islam. But they are also a manifestation of a radically new scramble for power playing out across the region in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring revolts.

This island nation off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia was the first place where Arab Spring demands for equal citizenship and democratic governance degenerated into a sectarian feud, and at first it seemed to be an anomaly. But Bahrain’s experience now appears to have been a harbinger of what was to come as centuries old but newly inflamed rivalries between Sunni and Shiite Muslims tear apart much of the region — threatening to erase the borders of states like Syria and Iraq, destabilizing Bahrain and Lebanon, and accelerating a regional contest for power and influence between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

Scholars and activists say that the sectarian violence gripping the Middle East is not simply the unleashing of religious rivalries once suppressed by the secular autocrats who ruled the region. Instead, they say, the religious resentments have been revived and exploited in a very earthly power struggle.

“There are forces that keep the tension alive in order to get a bigger piece of the cake,” said Sheikh Maytham al-Salman, a Shiite Muslim scholar who was detained for nine months and tortured by the Bahraini police in 2011 because of his support for the uprising.

Pearl Square, where demonstrators staged a weekslong sit-in three years ago, has now been turned into a permanent military camp, its namesake statue demolished, in a grim memorial of the day in March 2011 when vehicles and troops from the neighboring Sunni monarchies rolled across the causeway from Saudi Arabia to crush the Shiite-dominated movement for democracy.

Once aroused, however, sectarian wrath can be unpredictable and hard to control, even boomeranging against those who might have sought to exploit it. From the first stirring of Arab Spring protest in Syria, for example, the government of President Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian backers sought to portray the movement as a sectarian power grab by certain Sunni extremists, in order to rally Christians and other religious minorities against it. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-led Persian Gulf states sponsored satellite broadcasts firing up Sunni resentment of Shiite Iran and the Shiite-offshoot Alawite sect to which the Assads belong. And Sunni Arabs in Gulf monarchies funneled aid to the Sunni rebels as they grew increasingly violent.

Now, the Syrian revolt has fulfilled some of the worst sectarian fears — and threatened the security not only of the Assad family but also of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The most vicious Sunni extremists among the rebels, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, have seized a broad expanse of territory across both states and boasted of executing hundreds of Shiites and destroying their mosques.

Its rampage has brought it to the doorsteps of both the Iraqi government in Baghdad, an Iranian ally, and the Saudi Arabian monarchy, which has long feared such extremists as a threat to its own power at home.

Across the region, though, the resurgence of Sunni-Shiite sectarian hostilities has followed a pattern: The weakening of the old states leads anxious citizens to fall back on sectarian identity, while insecure rulers surround themselves with loyalists from their clans and denominations, systematically alienating others, often on sectarian lines. In the case of American allies like Bahrain and Iraq, analysts say, the United States and other Western powers turned a blind eye to the excesses and sectarianism of rulers they supported.

Hammering on those internal cracks, the region’s two geopolitical heavyweights, the Shiite theocracy in Iran and the Sunni monarchy in Saudi Arabia, have sought to protect their interests and influence by funneling support to clerics, satellite networks, political factions and armed groups squaring off along sectarian lines.

“Great powers gravitate to clients they can support,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of the region.

Saudi Arabia and Iran, he said, each employ a sectarian foreign policy to pursue classically secular objectives. “They play the game of great power politics and the chess pieces they choose inflame the sectarianism,” he said.

For the United States, the stakes include the stability of the region, the security of its allies and oil partners, and the risk that the regional power struggle might complicate attempts to broker a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program.

But Washington has also confounded many in the region by maintaining alliances on both sides of the sectarian struggle, with Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and in the Syrian opposition, but with the Shiites in power in Baghdad. In Bahrain, the United States effectively assented as the Saudi military helped crush the largely peaceful uprising by the Shiite majority. In Iraq, rights groups say Washington stayed silent amid mounting evidence that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was excluding the Sunni minority from power and condoning abuses against them.

Citing such conflicting entanglements, conspiracy theorists in the Arab media now often suggest that Washington may welcome the sectarian mayhem. “It is becoming the dominant narrative,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Secretary of State John Kerry recently flew to Baghdad to urge Iraq’s Shiite-led government to share power and eschew sectarianism, hoping that may relieve some of the resentment that has made part of the Sunni population receptive to the extremists.

In Bahrain, Shiite opposition leaders rolled their eyes. “We need to hear a similar message,” said Khalil al-Marzooq, a deputy chairman of Bahrain’s main Shiite opposition party, al-Wefaq, who was recently released from prison.

The split between Sunnis and Shiites began in the seventh century, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The dominant faction, which became Sunnis, argued that leadership should pass to Muhammad’s companion and father-in-law, Abu Baker. The faction that became Shiites argued for Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali.

Today Shiites comprise only about 15 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, although they form the majorities in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan and a plurality in Lebanon.

The theological differences are comparable to those dividing Catholics and Protestants, such as disagreements about the authority of clerics or the details of prayer rituals. Sunnis and Shiites have often lived together amicably and formed political alliances; intermarriage has been common.

But many Sunnis across the region still suggest Shiites are not true Muslims, while Shiites grumble of centuries of persecution.

In Iraq, the latest flash point, many polls conducted over the 11 years since the United States invasion consistently found that majorities of Sunnis and Shiites supported coexistence, describing their country as “mostly unified” instead of “mostly divided.”

But as Mr. Maliki has monopolized power and as rights abuses grew in recent years, national unity weakened. In a spring 2012 poll conducted by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, the percentage of Iraqis who said it was a “mostly divided” country jumped by 12 percentage points from the previous year, to 35 percent. Among Sunni Arabs, the portion who called it “mostly divided” doubled from the previous year, to 58 percent.

In Bahrain, when thousands of demonstrators marched to Pearl Square in defiance of the government in February 2011, most were Shiites. But one of the most visible leaders was Ibrahim Sharif, a Sunni Muslim known as an activist against government corruption and as the general secretary of Bahrain’s main liberal party.

He was also one of the first leaders arrested, abducted from his home by the police in the first hours after midnight on March 17, just after police stormed Pearl Square. Mr. Sharif “broke their story” that the uprising was a Shiite plot, his wife, Farida Ghulam Ismail, said in an interview. He remains in jail on charges of treason.

By the time of his arrest and the crackdown, the mostly Shiite protesters had increasingly taken up Shiite chants, adding to the fears of Sunnis. Bahrain’s government accused its Shiite opponents of holding weapons, plotting the violent overthrow of the monarchy and taking leadership and support from the government of Iran.

Opposition leaders called the charges fear-mongering, but since then there have been signs of both growing violence and Iranian involvement. In December, the Bahraini authorities intercepted an Iraqi ship sailing toward the island with Syrian and Iranian weapons. A Shiite group calling itself the Ashtar Brigade has reportedly claimed responsibility for attacks on security forces, including a bombing that killed two Bahraini police officers and an officer from the United Arab Emirates. Another officer died Saturday after being wounded in what Bahraini officials called a terrorist attack.

Many in the Bahraini opposition parties now say their only hope is a regional peace involving both Saudi Arabia and Iran, which might alleviate the ruling family’s fears of any concession to the Shiite majority.

But optimists note that tensions in Bahrain have not yet escalated into communal violence between Sunni and Shiite civilians. Some opposition leaders argue that while Bahrain could become the next powder keg to explode, it still has a chance to become a model of power-sharing.

“Why wait until there is a real disaster?” asked Mr. Marzooq, of Wefaq, the main Shiite party.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on July 6, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In New Fights, Ancient Split.

    Power Struggles in Middle East
    Exploit Islam’s Ancient Sectarian Rift, NYT, 5.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/world/
    middleeast/power-struggles-in-middle-east-exploit-islams-ancient-sectarian-rift.html

Autopsy Suggests Palestinian Teenager

Was Burned to Death After Abduction

 

JULY 5, 2014

The New York Times

By JODI RUDOREN

JERUSALEM — Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, spent his last hours before being abducted, beaten and most likely burned to death in one of his favorite places, doing some of his favorite things.

Until about 1 a.m. Wednesday, a close cousin said, Muhammad was at the recreation center named for his respected, expansive Palestinian family in the ancient section of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, impressing friends with his defensive prowess at the foosball table and watching World Cup matches on a flat-screen television he recently helped install.

“He came in with a Coke, he’s got to carry a bottle of Coca-Cola all the time,” said the cousin, Mohsen Abu Khdeir, a 40-year-old chiropractor who runs the center, called a “hoash” in Arabic. “He was a comedian kind of guy, always joking. He’s the dynamo. He’s the motor of the hoash.”

It was only three hours after Dr. Abu Khdeir dropped off Muhammad at home that he saw a Facebook post saying that the boy had been snatched from the street in what is widely suspected to have been an act of revenge by Jews for last month’s kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers. On Saturday, the Palestinian attorney general said that an autopsy had found soot in Muhammad’s lungs, suggesting that he had been burned alive before his charred body was found in a forest.

The preliminary autopsy findings, and reports that a 15-year-old, American-born cousin of Muhammad had been brutally beaten and then arrested by Israeli police officers during a violent clash in the neighborhood on Thursday, only increased the outrage Saturday in Shuafat and among Palestinians elsewhere.

Protests erupted in the evening in Nazareth and a village in Wadi Ara, two Arab areas in northern Israel, after confrontations on Friday in the north and in Jerusalem that led to dozens of injuries and 33 arrests.

Early Sunday morning, Israel unleashed 10 airstrikes on the Gaza Strip after what a military statement described as “constant rocket fire” from Gaza into southern Israel. Militants in Gaza had fired rockets into southern Israel throughout Saturday, including one that was intercepted by Israel’s missile-defense system as it headed toward Beersheba, the first to reach that large city since eight days of cross-border battles in 2012.

On Saturday evening, Israeli airstrikes hit three sites the military said belonged to Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates Gaza and that Israel blames for the June 12 attack on the three teenagers who studied at yeshivas in the occupied West Bank, and wounded a 31-year-old man in southern Gaza who the military said had fired one of the rockets.

Hamas officials said Friday that talks were underway to restore the 2012 cease-fire after Israel began massing troops around Gaza the day before, but Saturday’s exchanges — continuing a near-daily pattern of the past three weeks — indicated otherwise. Leaders on both sides have said they do not want an escalation.

As interactions between Israelis and Palestinians deteriorated both on the ground and on social media sites, where a new anti-Arab Facebook page quickly garnered 12,000 “likes,” religious and political delegations flocked to the mourning tent outside Muhammad’s house in Shuafat.

The first Abu Khdeir, named Hassan, started farming here 250 years ago. His descendants are now one of five main families in their well-to-do community, owning perhaps a third of the land and a dozen of the stores on its main street: Red and White Cosmetics, several groceries and the appliance shop run by Muhammad’s father. Now, said the dean of the family, a 71-year-old retired school principal named Ishak, there are some 5,000 Abu Khdeirs, a third of them in Shuafat.

They are religious and secular, members of the Fatah faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with many doctors and engineers, and a young generation that shuttles between Jerusalem and the family’s outposts in the United States.

“If you say you’re from Shuafat, they know you’re Abu Khdeir,” said Mison Abu Khdeir, 26, an architect who was born in Chicago and moved here in 2000. “Our family is so big it gives kind of a sense of safety. Wherever you go, you know somebody.”

It was another cousin, Tariq, a high school sophomore visiting from Tampa, Fla., for summer vacation, who was savagely beaten Thursday by what human rights groups said were undercover Israeli officers. “The continued state-sanctioned violence against children is unlawful and unacceptable,” Addameer, a Palestinian group that supports prisoners in Israeli jails, said in a news release that included photos of Tariq’s badly bruised face and hugely swollen lips.

Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman in Washington, said an American consular officer visited Tariq on Saturday, and she called for a “speedy, transparent and credible investigation,” strongly condemning “any excessive use of force.”

Israel’s Justice Ministry opened an investigation on Saturday into what the justice minister, Tzipi Livni, called “a very serious incident by uniformed personnel.”

Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israel Police, said a video circulated by the rights groups was “edited and biased” and did not represent the scope of events. He said Tariq was one of six Palestinians arrested — three of them carrying knives — after a clash in which 15 officers were injured when “hundreds of rioters, many of them masked, hurled at the forces pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones.”

Mr. Rosenfeld said that there had been “no breakthroughs” Saturday in the investigation into whether Muhammad’s murder was an act of vengeance or some other kind of crime, and that “a gag order” prevented him from revealing what it had found so far. “It’s critical for us to determine what the motive was,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.

The pace of the police investigation stirred anger in Shuafat, where everyone seemed to have seen footage from security cameras that shows two men forcing Muhammad into a gray Hyundai. Two days earlier, several residents said, the same car stopped on the same street, and people they called “Jewish settlers” tried to kidnap 8-year-old Mousa Zaloum, slashing the boy’s neck and forearm with a knife. Some parents said they would no longer let youngsters walk alone to the store or take the bus.

“Today is my cousin, tomorrow my son,” said Abir Abu Khdeir, 45, one of scores of mourning women in the shaded courtyard outside Muhammad’s home. “All Shuafat is in danger, all the settlers around us. It’s like a monster — they want to eat us.”

Muhammad’s mother, Suha, sat in the center, interrupting interviews to cover her tears with an orange washcloth. Muhammad was the fifth of her seven children, a goofy jokester who danced the dabke, a traditional line dance, in a folk troupe. He was a devoted fan of the Real Madrid soccer team and went weekly to a barber to keep the sides of his head closely shaven.

His mother said she had just given Muhammad breakfast when he left at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday for the prayer that starts the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“For the last four days, I didn’t see my son, I cannot bear it anymore — I call him all the time,” said Ms. Abu Khdeir. “I hope that the Jewish mothers feel what I am feeling,” she said. “May God burn them like I am burned.”
 

Said Ghazali and Jonathan Rosen
contributed reporting from Jerusalem,
and Fares Akram from Gaza.

A version of this article appears in print on July 6, 2014,
on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline:
Autopsy Suggests Palestinian Teenager Was Burned to Death After Abduction.

    Autopsy Suggests Palestinian Teenager Was Burned to Death After Abduction,
    NYT, 5.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/world/middleeast/
    autopsy-suggests-palestinian-boy-was-burned-alive-reports-say.html

An Israeli airstrike on Tuesday in Gaza City.

Palestinian health officials in Gaza said at least 70 people had been killed in the attacks on Tuesday,

vaulting the death toll in the past three weeks to nearly 1,200.

Mohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency

Israel Steps Up Airstrikes in Gaza as International Cease-Fire Efforts Stumble

By ISABEL KERSHNER and FARES AKRAM        NYT        30 July 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-violence.html