Hamas' Gaza rulers on Tuesday said they had reached a long-awaited ceasefire with Israel meant to end months of Palestinian assaults on Israeli border towns and bruising Israeli retaliation.
The announcement came shortly after Egypt, which has been trying to broker the truce for months, said the ceasefire would go into effect tomorrow. Israel refused to confirm a deal, but said a “new reality” would take hold if Palestinian attacks end.
In a last-minute jolt, Israeli aircraft attacked three targets in the southern Gaza Strip. One of the airstrikes destroyed a car, killing the five militants inside. A large crowd gathered around the car’s smoldering remains, and a puddle of blood was visible on the asphalt.
Hamas officials accused Israel of trying to undermine the truce, but said they would not let the violence derail the Egyptian efforts.
“We are going to commit ourselves to the start time that Egypt is going to declare regarding the calm,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said. However, the group’s television station said the movement would respond to “any Zionist aggression,” underscoring the delicate situation.
Egypt’s powerful intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, has been meeting separately with Israeli and Hamas officials for months in hopes of brokering a truce.
The state-run Egyptian news agency MENA cited an unidentified high-level Egyptian official as saying both sides “have agreed on the first phase” of a package to end the violence in Gaza.
It said the first phase would be a “mutual and simultaneous calm” in the Gaza Strip beginning at 6am tomorrow.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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