‘Stop fighting, start talking’ Ban tells Israel, Palestinians

TEL AVIV, Israel – UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday urged Israel and the Palestinians to stop the bloodshed in Gaza as he sought to broker an end to a fortnight of deadly violence.

Speaking at a news conference after arriving in Tel Aviv, Ban described Hamas rocket fire on Israel as “shocking,” saying it must “stop immediately”.

“My message to Israelis and Palestinians is the same: Stop fighting, start talking and take on the root causes of the conflict so that we are not at the same situation in the next six months or a year,” he said.

The secretary-general said he had seen photographic and video evidence of Palestinian rocket fire on Israel, describing it as “quite shocking” and saying all countries had an “international obligation to protect” their citizens.

“The UN position is clear: we condemn strongly rocket attacks. These must stop immediately,” he said.

But Israel must exercise “maximum restraint,” Ban said as the body count in Gaza soared over 600, with many of the victims women and children.

And he urged the Jewish state to take a hard look at some of the root causes of the violence.

“We must address the underlying issues including mutual recognition, occupation, despair and denial of dignity so people will not feel they have to resort to violence as a means of expressing their grievances,” he said.

Fundamental choice

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday again placed the onus on Hamas to accept a ceasefire along the lines of an Egyptian proposal to end the raging conflict in Gaza.

The top US diplomat was speaking in Cairo after meeting Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whose government’s ceasefire proposal last week was accepted by Israel but rejected by Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

Kerry voiced support for the initiative as a “framework” to end the fighting that has killed almost 600 Palestinians and 29 Israelis in two weeks of fighting.

But Hamas, which has been relentlessly firing rockets into Israel, insists the Jewish state lift its eight-year blockade of Gaza before it agrees a truce.

“While we still have work to do, it is clear to each party I met that there is a framework available to end the violence, and that framework was the Egyptian initiative,” Kerry said at a press conference after meeting Sisi.

Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and Israel, has brokered truces in past conflicts but has had less sway over Hamas after blacklisting the militant movement earlier this year.

The government accuses it of aiding Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which Sisi overthrew last year.

Kerry, who has invested much of his tenure in an unsuccessful bid for a lasting Middle East peace agreement, again placed the blame for the latest conflict on Hamas, having made a similar statement to ABC television at the weekend.

“For two weeks now, we have seen Hamas launch rocket after rocket at Israeli neighbourhoods,” he said Tuesday.

“Israel responded as any country has the right to do when it is under attack,” he said.

“Hamas has a fundamental choice to make,” he added. – Rappler.com