WORLD> Middle East
Gaza fighting slows as Israel counters Hamas offer
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-01-16 21:28


An Israeli soldier looks up through the hatch of an armoured vehicle as it moves near Atatra in the northern Gaza Strip January 15, 2009. [Agencies] 

Medics taking advantage of a four-hour "humanitarian pause" said they had recovered 23 bodies on Friday from the previous day's fighting in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in the city's southwest, scene of some of the most intense clashes.

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Diplomats have spoken with growing confidence that some kind of ceasefire will be arranged in the coming days and suggested that Israel had been making a last push against its Islamist enemies before a deal was brokered.

An Israeli air strike on Thursday killed one of Hamas's top leaders, Saeed Seyyam, the interior minister in Gaza's unrecognized government and leader of 13,000 armed security men. Nine other people were killed in that bombing.

Chanting crowds attended Seyyam's funeral on Friday.

Washington visit

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, whose prospects in a February 10 election may have been improved by the short war costing no more than 13 Israeli lives, was to hold talks on Friday in Washington with the outgoing administration of George W. Bush.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Washington, his most important ally, would commit in writing to steps to prevent Hamas from rearming through smuggling tunnels from Egypt, the Jewish state's main condition for a lasting ceasefire.

Egypt is mediating between Israel and Hamas, which is shunned by Israel and its Western allies for its refusal to abandon an objective of destroying the Jewish state by force and establishing an Islamist state in all of what was Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948.

Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli official, arrived in Cairo again on Friday. "When we are briefed by Gilad and Livni, there may be a full security cabinet meeting and decisions will stem from that," Regev said.

Hamas and diplomatic sources said on Thursday that Hamas had offered a one-year, renewable truce on condition that all Israeli forces withdrew within a week and that all the border crossings with Israel and Egypt would be opened.

Except for limited humanitarian supplies, the crossings have been all but closed under an Israeli-led blockade since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah faction. Hamas had won a Palestinian parliamentary election the previous year.