© Malcolm EvansRoad map to peace
A Hamas official said Egyptian mediators had clinched a truce with Israel on Tuesday that would go into effect within hours, but Egypt and Israel said a Gaza ceasefire deal was still up in the air after a week of fighting.
"The talks are still continuing," an Egyptian official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters. He said Cairo was hopeful of an agreement later in the day.
Israel pressed on with its strikes in Gaza on the seventh day of its offensive and Palestinian rockets still flashed across the border as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton headed to the region after attending an Asian summit.
The Jewish state launched the campaign last week with the declared aim of halting the rocketing of its towns from the Palestinian enclave, ruled by the Hamas
militant [Democratically Elected] group that [according to Israel] does not recognize Israel's right to exist.
Medical officials in Gaza said 21 Palestinians were killed on Tuesday. An Israeli soldier and a civilian died when rockets exploded near the Gaza frontier, police and the army said.
Gaza medical officials say 130 people have died in Israeli strikes, mostly civilians, including 31 children. In all, five Israelis have died, including three civilians killed last week.
Clinton was due to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late on Tuesday in Jerusalem. Earlier, he said that Israel was open to a long-term deal aimed at ending Palestinian rocket attacks that have plagued its southern region for years.
Comment: How is it that Hamas is said to NOT recognize Israel, when in fact Hamas (an elected political body, which Israel refuses to consider anything but a terrorist organization) is there at the negotiating table with Israel?
Netanyahu, master of turning the table and blaming the victim: "No country would tolerate rocket attacks against its cities and against its civilians. Israel cannot tolerate such attacks," Netanyahu said. Unless they are Hamas, Hamas is supposed to sit back and do nothing on the other side of the 30' wall that surrounds Gaza, on the other side of whichis their own country, Palestine, stolen from them (Hamas and the Palestinian people). They should sit idly by as another child is shredded into pulp from an apartheid tower. That is the thinking of Netanyahu. And all the world should bow to the whim of God's chosen people.
As the image above shows we've seen all of this many times before.
Comment: Debka Files is connected to Israeli intelligence. Its primary purpose is not to inform the public but to spread disinformation and propaganda - always under the pretense that intelligence sources provide validity.
In this case it is easy to catch the lie. For starters, Netanyahu has been eager for a while to start a war on Iran, so it was more or less expected that Israel would try to link the attack on Gaza (or anything for the matter) to Iran. Second, it does not make sense for Iran to give Israel and the US an excuse to bomb them, as that would be remarkably suicidal.
But lets look at the Fajar-5 (or Fajr-5) rockets. According to wikipedia these are the specifications: Are we supposed to believe that rockets which are more than 6 meters in length and which require a 10.45 meter launcher, and weighing some 16,000 kg (including the system), have been smuggled into Gaza through the tunnels? Gaza is under seige and under constant Israeli surveillance. How big do you imagine smuggling tunnels to be, and how easy do you think it is to carry supplies through them? Even if the rockets were dismantled, how many of them do you think could be succesfully delivered, reassembled and launched, and how much manpower and time would that require?
If you ask us, we would be surprised if they got one rocket operational after a year of taking a couple of screws at a time, and very lucky if it actually flew. It is interesting that the supposed Fajr-5 rockets launched to Tel Aviv either fell on the sea, were shot down by the Iron Dome, or hit some unspecified street without confirmed damages - depending on which version of the story you got.