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Israel and Hamas reject UN call for cease-fire in Gaza By Ethan Bronner Friday, January 9, 2009 JERUSALEM: Israel and Hamas rebuffed a United Nations call for a cease-fire in the 14-day Gaza war on Friday, with Israel saying continued barrages of rocket fire from its adversaries made the United Nations resolution "unworkable." In a statement after a cabinet meeting as the two sides traded fire, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the Israeli military would "continue acting to protect Israeli citizens and will carry out the missions it was given," according to news reports. Officials from Hamas dismissed the United Nations resolution, according to news reports, although one official said it was being studied. As the war continued unchecked on Friday, the Israeli military said its forces attacked more than 50 targets in overnight despite the United Nations vote on Thursday night calling for "an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire." Israeli warplanes attacked launching sites and missile-manufacturing facilities, the military said, while witnesses reported seeing around 30 rockets fired out of Gaza into southern Israel. The casualty toll was not immediately known. One Israeli air strike destroyed a five-story building, killing at least seven people, Hamas security officials told The Associated Press. The developments came as international aid groups lashed out at Israel, saying that access to civilians in need is poor, relief workers are being hurt and killed, and Israel is woefully neglecting its obligations to Palestinians who are trapped, some among rotting corpses in a nightmarish landscape of deprivation. One of the most grisly accounts of civilian loss has revolved around an extended family of Palestinians in the Zeitoun district of Gaza city who began telling their story to a reporter last Monday after, they said, Israeli forces ordered them to leave their separate homes and gather indoors at a single dwelling. At that time, Israeli forces were in the early stages of a ground offensive in Gaza and seized several high-rise buildings on the outskirts of Gaza City commanding a field of fire into the tangled street below. From the beginning, members of the Samouni family said, they had been trying to contact the Red Cross to be evacuated but no help came. Initial reports about the incident on Monday said 11 members of the Samouni extended family were killed and 26 wounded, according to witnesses and hospital officials, with five children age 4 and under among the dead. Only on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement on Thursday, did Israel give Red Cross representatives permission to enter Zeitoun, and what the operatives found there chilled them. Four small children , so weak they could not stand unassisted, cowered next to the corpses of slain mothers, the Red Cross said on Thursday. At least 12 corpses lay on mattresses and three more bodies were found in another house. On Friday, it seemed, the carnage had been worse than at first suspected. The United Nations Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs said a total of over 100 people had been ordered to leave their homes and gather in the single dwelling last Sunday. "The next day the house was shelled," Allegra Pacheco, a spokeswoman for the United Nations office, told BBC television, quoting unidentified witnesses. And as rescuers finally removed corpses from the rubble, the death toll rose to 30, Pacheco said on Friday. It was one of the most grisly, known incidents of the Gaza war. Pacheco said her organization was not making any accusations at present about who was responsible for the 30 reported deaths. Initial accounts by members of the Samouni family said they believed the house in which they gathered had been the target of an air-strike at 6 a.m. Monday. But the Red Cross said Thursday that the building had been "affected by Israeli shelling." The Zeitoun killings have ignited international outcry. In a rare and sharply critical statement, the Red Cross said it believed that "the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded." Israeli officials said that they were examining all the allegations, that they did not aim at civilians and that they were not certain that the source of fire that killed and wounded the United Nations drivers was Israeli. "We do our utmost to avoid hitting civilians, and many times we don't fire because we see civilians nearby," said Major Avital Leibovich, chief army spokeswoman for the foreign media. "We are holding meetings with UN officials to try to work out a mechanism so that their work can go forward." She said that the army learned of the Red Cross allegations in a media report, and that the committee had not yet presented the evidence of what she called "these very serious allegations" to the army. Separately, the United Nations declared a suspension of its aid operations after one of its drivers was killed and two others were wounded despite driving United Nations-flagged vehicles and coordinating their movements with the Israeli military. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called for an investigation by Israel for a second time in a week of the more than 40 deaths near a United Nations school from Israeli tank fire on Tuesday. The Red Cross also said it was restricting its operations on Friday after one of its trucks was hit by small arms fire. At the United Nations , fourteen nations approved the Security Council resolution urging a cease-fire, with the United States abstaining. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States abstained , which left it unclear how a cease-fire would be enforced, because it wanted to see whether mediation efforts undertaken by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt would succeed. The United States did not veto the resolution because Washington supports its overall goals, she said. The resolution called for a cease-fire that would lead to the "full withdrawal" of Israeli forces from Gaza, the passage of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and an end to the trafficking of arms and ammunition into the territory. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
