WASHINGTON: The United States welcomed the declaration of a ceasefire in fighting between Israel and Hamas on Monday, and warned that the onus was on the Palestinian militia to maintain the truce.
"This is a real opportunity. We strongly support the initiative," Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken told CNN, when asked about an Egyptian proposal for a 72-hour pause in hostilities.
Separately, both Hamas and Israel have accepted the Egyptian initiative, under which both sides are supposed to halt offensive activity in and around Gaza from 8:00 am (0500 GMT) on Tuesday.
Blinken welcomed both sides' committment, but made it clear that Washington feels the burden is on the Hamas administration in Gaza to keep the guns silent, after previous ceasefires collapsed.
And even as he was speaking on CNN, US President Barack Obama was in the Oval Office signing into law a bill to provide a further $225 million to help Israel maintain its "Iron Dome" anti-missile shield.
"Israel has achieved its core objectives in Gaza. It's dealt with the tunnels. It's able to deal with the rockets outside Gaza if it has to," Blinken said, referring to tunnels used by Hamas commandos to infiltrate Israel.
"The burden is on Hamas, I think, to demonstrate it will live up to the ceasefire," he continued. "Then there's an opportunity to get to a more durable ceasefire and deal with some of the underlying issues.
"It has to start with Israel's security, dealing much more definitively with the rockets, with the tunnels over time, but also with the development of Gaza, so that people can live under different conditions."
The United States has long been Israel's most staunch defender in the international community, but in recent days Washington has expressed concern Israeli strikes are causing excessive civilian deaths.
On Sunday, Washington said it was appalled at Israel's "disgraceful" bombing of a UN school in Gaza, using unusually blunt words.
But State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters insisted that there was no serious rift between Washington and Israel.
"There's more that Israel can do to prevent civilian casualties," she admitted, but this "does not change the fact that Israel remains an important security and strategic partner of the United States."
"We believe they have the right to defend themselves. While in that while they have the right to defend themselves, there is more they can do in that regard to prevent events like those that happened just yesterday."
Psaki said the main US goal was "to prevent the indiscriminate rocket attacks and terrorists coming up through tunnels into Israel. We haven't our concerns about that haven't changed."
The United States expects to spend a total 30 billion dollars on military aid to Israel between 2009 and 2018. In 2014, Israel received $3.1 billion in military aid.
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