Israel rebuffs U.N. plea to ease Gaza blockade
U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon wants Israel to allow food aid trucks into the Gaza Strip. But top Israeli officials say Palestinian militants must first stop their cross-border rocket attacks.
Reporting from Jerusalem — For the second time this week, Israel today resisted a plea by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip and urged the world to condemn Palestinian rocket attacks instead.
Gazans have endured shortages of electricity and some food staples since a 5-month-old cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the coastal enclave, began to unravel on Nov. 4.
Since then Defense Minister Ehud Barak has kept Israel's border crossings with Gaza closed, with a few exceptions, arguing that the soldiers required to supervise them would be easy targets for rocket fire.
Ban telephoned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week to call for passage into Gaza of trucks from two U.N. agencies that feed about two-thirds of the territory's 1.5 million people. Getting no satisfaction, he phoned again today to make the same appeal to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
Livni told him the blockade would continue until militants hold their fire.
"Whoever thinks that a situation of them firing at us, while everything continues as usual, can exist is mistaken," her office said in a statement. "The international community must be more decisive in making itself heard, and in using its influence, in the face of these attacks."
The Egyptian-brokered cease-fire is due to expire next month, causing jitters across the region. Despite the violations this month -- the firing of more than 170 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel by Palestinian militants and small-scale Israeli army incursions that have killed 15 militants in Gaza -- neither side has renounced the truce.
In an unusual meeting in Jordan this week, King Abdullah II warned Olmert and Barak that a large-scale military operation in Gaza would destabilize the Middle East.
Hamas and an allied militant group, Islamic Jihad, announced today that they were ready to halt the attacks if Israel opens the border crossings and stops the incursions. The attacks from Gaza tapered off today; the Israeli army counted just one incoming rocket, which caused no harm.
U.N. officials say the security threat posed by the rockets, which have caused few injuries and no deaths in Israel, does not justify such tight border restrictions. Because it controls most access points to Gaza, the officials say, Israel is obligated under international law to try to maintain essential services for the territory's civilians in the face of conflict.
