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JERUSALEM: Israel’s massive military operation in
the Gaza Strip since Saturday is “winding down,” a military
spokesman said on Monday.
Operation Hot Winter claimed the
lives of over 70 Palestinians including women and children amid an
international outcry over the deadly onslaught that prompted even
the moderate Palestinian leadership to cut off all peace talks.
“The operation is winding down.
Almost all our forces have already returned to Israel,” the
spokesman told Agence France-Presse.
Israeli armored vehicles had
started to withdraw from the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza
City, witnesses said at dawn on Monday.
Israeli public radio said the
operation was in fact over.
Israel had continued to hammer
Gaza on Monday in its bid to stop rockets being fired at southern
Israel from the Gaza Strip after vowing to press its campaign
against militants.
There were five Palestinian
activists who were killed in raids by Israeli aircraft and shelling
of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli navy, Palestinian security
officials said.
Israeli warplanes carried out
five other raids against metal workshops throughout the Gaza Strip,
after two earlier raids late Sunday destroyed a metal workshop and
injured one person.
Yet another air raid destroyed
the headquarters of members of the Palestinian parliament in Khan
Yunes in the south of the Strip, the officials said.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had
vowed Sunday to continue the ground and air operation that has
killed 78 Palestinians since Saturday following the death of one
Israeli civilian last week and earned the Jewish state international
condemnation for disproportionate use of force.
Even Israel’s closest ally the
United States called for a halt to the violence and a return to the
negotiating table.
Palestinian President Mahmud
Abbas suspended all contacts with Israel over the assault, which
besides killing dozens of militants has also claimed the lives of
many Palestinian women and children.
The announcement came just days
before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to arrive in the
region on her latest attempt to push forward the troubled peace
negotiations revived just three months ago.
The two sides resumed peace talks
to great fanfare at a conference in the United States in late
November, but have made almost no progress since then, while
violence in and around the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip has sharply
escalated. The White House already urged both sides to resume the
talks.
“The violence needs to stop and
the talks need to resume,” National Security Council spokesman
Gordon Johndroe told reporters at President George W. Bush’s ranch
in Texas.
At least 312 people have been
killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence, most of them Gaza militants,
since the relaunch of peace talks in November, 107 of them since
Wednesday alone, according to an AFP tally.
--AFP
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