GAZA: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he would hold talks in Egypt on Tuesday with President Hosni Mubarak to seek ways to promote Middle East peacemaking.
“I believe we have an interest in moving the peace process forward in a variety of ways,” Netanyahu, announcing the visit, told reporters at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.
Netanyahu said he had requested the meeting with Mubarak after talks that Egypt’s intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, held in Israel last week. “I intend to continue this important dialogue,” he said.
Egypt and Germany are mediating a prisoner trade between Israel and Hamas under which the Islamist group, in charge of the Gaza Strip, would release captured soldier Gilad Shalit and Israel would free some 1,000 of the 11,000 Palestinians in its jails.
Hamas leaders are weighing Israel’s response to a proposed swap. Officials familiar with the negotiations said Israel has ruled out releasing a handful of top militants serving life sentences for orchestrating lethal attacks.
Israel, the officials said, was also intent on barring between 100 and 120 Palestinian prisoners from returning to the occupied West Bank, which is close to Israel’s main cities, and wants them to be sent to Gaza or abroad. “At this stage there is no deal and it is not clear to me whether there will be one,” a participant in Sunday’s Cabinet meeting quoted Netanyahu as saying.
Meanwhile, sirens wailed across the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the still-devastated Hamas-ruled enclave marked one year since the start of Israel’s most brutal offensive ever launched on the territory. Events marking the anniversary began with sirens sounding at 11:20 a.m. (0920 GMT), when the first bombs of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” launched in a bid to halt years of rocket fire from the enclave, slammed into the coastal strip.
Senior Hamas leader Ahmed Bahar struck a defiant tone, saying the “will of the steadfast and the resistance was victorious” at a ceremony unveiling a war memorial with the names of hundreds of Palestinians killed in the fighting.
“Gaza was steadfast and did not fall in this ugly, destructive war... And the resistance, which defended its land with honor, was not broken,” he said. “We call on all the sons of our people to unite and to take to the trenches of the resistance to face the criminal Zionist occupation.”
Several demonstrations were to be held during the day and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was to make a television address in the evening, with Hamas planning to stage events for 22 days, the length of the war.
“The goal of such event is to keep this massacre fresh in the world memory,” said Ihab Al-Ghussein, spokesman of Hamas Interior Ministry.
“We are the victors, we are the fighters, we are steadfast,” Khalil Al-Hiya, a senior Hamas leader told the crowd.
“Those were dark days. There was killing in every street and alley,” said Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services, who had 16 paramedics killed as they struggled to collect the wounded.
In a separate development, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday called on Egypt to stop building a steel wall along the Gaza border that could obstruct tunnels.
Nasrallah told a crowd of tens of thousands of Lebanese that Egypt should be condemned if it does not halt the wall building. Agencies
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