ISRAEL blitzed Gaza from the air Sunday early morning, setting the interior ministry ablaze and killing a Palestinian fighter in the latest offensive aimed at freeing a soldier held by Palestinian militants.
Egypt, which has been mediating in the crisis, said on Friday the ruling Hamas movement had agreed to secure the release of the soldier, but that Israel had so far not agreed to the conditions.
Israel pounded Gaza with 30 air raids, hitting the Hamas-controlled interior ministry, and striking weapons depots, Hamas training camps and access roads, according to the Israeli army.
The office of Palestinian interior minister Siad Siam, a senior Hamas leader, was also specifically targeted.
Israel had called a halt on Thursday to a planned incursion into the northern Gaza Strip amid international appeals for diplomatic efforts to free 19-year-old Gilad Shalit, seized in an attack on an army post on June 25.
ents published on Friday that Hamas has agreed to secure Shalit’s release, on certain conditions.
‘Egyptian contacts, including some Hamas representatives, have given positive responses. The movement has accepted, conditionally, to have the Israeli soldier returned as soon as possible to avoid an escalation,’ Mubarak said in an interview with the government newspaper Al-Ahram.
‘Up to now, the Israeli side does not accept,’ he added, but gave no details of the Palestinian conditions.
‘I am personally deploying all possible efforts, late into the night, to avoid a real catastrophe which would scorch the whole region,’ he said.
Israeli troops have rounded up more than 64 Hamas members, including eight ministers – a third of the Palestinian cabinet – and 24 lawmakers in a vast military sweep overnight on Wednesday.
Hamas, boycotted by Israel and the West as a terrorist group, condemned the arrests as a declaration of ‘open war’ aimed at destroying its government.
Meeting in Moscow, foreign ministers of the G8 group of industrialised nations called on Israel to exercise the ‘utmost restraint’.
Many parts of Gaza, already facing a dire humanitarian crisis because of a cut in Western aid since Hamas took office, are without electricity and water.
Defence Minister Amir Peretz has insisted that Israel, which has a force of about 5,000 troops massed on the border, had no intention of retaking Gaza, where about 1.4 million mostly impoverished Palestinians live.
But in a sign of the sharp deterioration in relations with the Palestinians, a meeting to prepare for a summit between Israeli premier Olmert and Palestinian president Abbas was cancelled on Thursday.
