Israel and Hamas on Monday stuck to a 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza as Egyptian mediators launched fresh talks with negotiators aimed at securing a permanent cessation of hostilities.
Quiet returned to the enclave from midnight, the fruit of days of Egyptian-brokered mediation to stem violence which has killed 1,939 Palestinians and 67 on the Israeli side since July 8.
More than 12 hours into the truce, there were no reports of violations on either side and signs of life emerged on the streets of the war-torn coastal enclave which is home to 1.8 million Palestinians.
Shops and businesses opened their doors and outside a UN-run school, a clutch of cars and donkey carts waited to take some refugees back to homes they had fled during the fighting.
“We want to go back to see what happened to our house,” said Hikmat Atta, 58, who piled his family into a small cart to visit the home they left in the northern town of Beit Lahiya in the first days of the war.
But with the second truce in a week still in its early stages, he was not taking any chances.
“We’re just going back for the day, at night we’ll come back here,” he said.
Palestinian emergency services said that a one-month-old baby girl died Monday of injuries sustained during the offensive in the central Gaza Strip.
In Cairo, Egyptian intelligence mediators threw themselves back into shuttle diplomacy that unravelled after rocket attacks breached the previous 72-hour truce on Friday.
They spent Monday locked in talks with the Palestinian delegation and were to relay their demands to Israeli negotiators, who returned to Cairo three days after abandoning the talks when Palestinian rocket attacks resumed on southern Israel.
Egypt has urged the warring sides to use the new lull to reach “a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire,” after efforts to extend a similar truce last week collapsed into a firestorm of violence.
Israel insists that the security of millions of its citizens subject to constant fear from Palestinian rocket attacks be guaranteed.
Hamas, the de facto power in Gaza, has conditioned its acceptance of any permanent agreement on Israel lifting its eight-year blockade on Gaza.
“In the case of Israeli procrastination or continued aggression, Hamas is ready with other Palestinian factions to resist on the ground and politically,” its exiled leader Khaled Meshaal told AFP in Doha.
James Rawley, the top UN humanitarian official for the Palestinian territories, said Israel’s security concerns must be addressed but warned that without ending the blockade another conflict was likely.
“Not only will we see very little in the way of reconstruction, but I am afraid that the conditions are in place for us to have another round of violence,” he said.
Palestinian delegates in Cairo said they would be happy for Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to take over the reconstruction of Gaza and execute any agreement reached in Cairo.
