Israel completed a troop pullout from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Wednesday, starting its relationship with US President Barack Obama by leaving Palestinian land devastated by its 22-day offensive. "We've redeployed on our side of the frontier and we will follow events closely," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
"If Hamas breaks the cease-fire, we of course reserve the right to act to protect our people." Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, endorsed Israel's right to defend itself against rocket fire by the Gaza Strip's ruling Hamas Islamists. Obama, before taking office, declined to comment in detail on the Gaza crisis.
In a telephone call to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama reiterated that he and his administration would work to achieve Middle East peace, a Palestinian official said. Regev said he was not immediately aware if Obama also had telephoned the Israeli leader.
Under international pressure to end the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian fighting in decades, Israel and Hamas declared separate cease-fires on Sunday, opening the way for more aid to be brought into the rubble-strewn enclave where thousands are homeless.
Reconstruction, if it can be launched in light of the West shunning of Hamas as a "terrorist" group, may cost close to $2 billion, according to Palestinian and international estimates. Diplomatic efforts led by Egypt were focusing on reaching a long-term Israel-Hamas truce deal, far short of an accord on Palestinian statehood sought by the United States and other international peace brokers.
Israel's attacks in an offensive it began on December 27 killed some 1,300 Palestinians. Gaza medical officials said the Palestinian dead included at least 700 civilians. Israel said hundreds of militants died and that it dealt Hamas a strong blow that had boosted the Jewish state's power of deterrence and drawn international pledges to help to prevent the Islamist group from replenishing its rocket arsenal.
Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by cross-border rocket fire, were killed in the conflict. Israel's Haaretz daily, reporting what it said were details of an army probe into its soldiers' use of white-phosphorous shells in the offensive, said 200 were fired in the fighting, including 20 in a built-up area in the northern Gaza Strip.
Two Palestinian children were killed and 14 people suffered severe burns on January 17 when Israeli shells landed in a UN-run school in the northern Beit Lahiya area, medical officials said.
Amnesty International has accused Israel of war crimes over its use of the high-incendiary munitions in heavily populated areas. Calling the troop withdrawal a "victory for Palestinian resistance", Hamas demanded a lifting of the blockade Israel tightened on the Gaza Strip after the Islamist group seized control of the territory from the Fatah movement in 2007.
Israel said at the start of the military campaign it never intended for its army, which quit the Gaza Strip in 2005 after 38 years of occupation, to remain there permanently. Most of the Israeli forces pulled out before Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, in a move analysts saw as an attempt to avoid any early tensions with his administration that could cloud the beginning of a new era in a key alliance.
Looking ahead to reconstruction efforts, Israel has told the United Nations and other aid groups they must apply for project-by-project Israeli approval and provide guarantees none of the work will benefit Hamas, Western and Palestinian officials said.
Israel, the officials said, is also preventing the Western-backed Palestinian Authority from transferring cash to the Gaza Strip to pay its workers and others hard-hit by war.
The restrictions threatened to undercut the ability of Abbas's West Bank-based government to reassert a presence in the enclave. Hamas officials and an Israeli envoy planned to meet separately with Egyptian mediators in Cairo on Thursday to discuss ways to make the cease-fire "durable" and a reopening of border crossings, an official close to the talks said.
Israel is seeking as yet unspecified measures to stop Hamas smuggling weapons across the Gaza-Egypt frontier, a sensitive matter given Cairo's past efforts to play down its scope. Palestinians residing in the border area, where Israel heavily bombed smuggling tunnels during the war, said only a small number were still functioning and were being used to bring in fuel.
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