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UN reaches agreement on ceasefire in Gaza Strip

By David Usborne in New York


The United Nations went into session late last night to vote to adopt a milestone resolution calling for an "immediate" end to military action by all sides in the Gaza Strip, a breakthrough that only became possible after the United States abruptly signalled its willingness hours earlier to accept such a text.

Officials confirmed that an agreement had been reached on the wording of a ceasefire text after hours of marathon negotiations on the sidelines of the Security Council meeting between the foreign ministers of Britain, France and the US on the one hand and their counterparts from several Arab nations on the other. Preparing to go into the session to vote, the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, said he was optimistic that the vote would be "unanimous".

Speaking earlier in an implicit nod to the US change of position, Mr Miliband said: "It is not every day that the United Nations speaks loudly and clearly and across all the nations in the UN about the Middle East."

Only one day before, the council had seemed to be on a path to humiliating failure, when the US publicly threatened to veto a ceasefire text that had been presented by Libya, which currently holds one of the non-permanent seats. It declared itself ready only to back a far less muscled "presidential statement" that expressed dismay with the fighting.

Even Britain was reportedly taken by surprise when late in the evening on Wednesday, the US delegation, headed by the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, changed tack and said it would support a ceasefire resolution, if not the Libyan one.

It was then Britain's task to craft a new version that eventually attracted consensus support last night.

How quickly the resolution will impact events on the ground is a different matter, of course. The Israeli offensive against Gaza militants continued unabated yesterday despite intensive discussions in Cairo on an outline peace plan.

The Israeli military said it had attacked 25 targets, including Hamas weapons stores, rocket-launching sites and a junction that had been rigged with explosives to blow up advancing troops. Earlier, it had also hit three Islamic Jihad militants involved in launching rockets on Israel. The army said another Israeli soldier had been killed yesterday in Gaza, bringing the total military casualties to eight in the current offensive.

Meanwhile, at least three Katyusha rockets were fired into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, injuring six Israelis. It appeared to be an isolated attack, for which both Hizbollah and Hamas disclaimed any responsibility. Israeli troops responded with artillery fire. Israeli security forces heightened their alert and ordered Israelis into bomb shelters along the northern border area.

Mr Miliband expressed the hope that the resolution would be heeded and would help speed the negotiation of its practicalities in Cairo. Sending a clear message to Israel and to Hamas, he said: "The UN can pass resolutions, but it is the decisions of the people on the ground that can make the difference between peace and war".

There had been deep concern in London and in other European capitals that a different outcome in New York and specifically a result that involved the US vetoing a ceasefire resolution would have inflamed passions across the Middle East, where Arabs continue to resent American support for Israel.

It may in the end have been that concern that led Washington down the path to supporting the new text, even though it may be seen this morning as an unusual rebuff to Israel. Sources in New York reported that as she shuttled in and out of negotiating sessions yesterday, Ms Rice phoned the Israeli Prime Minster, Ehud Olmert, at least five times to keep him up to date.

It was thought that she and Washington were simultaneously coming under intense pressure from Arab allies to support a ceasefire text.
Independent

Israel retracts claim of militant fire at UN school

UN calls for independent investigation into Israel’s bombing of school as possible war crime.

PACIFICA – UN spokesperson Chris Gunness said Israeli officials have privately retracted their widely cited initial claim that Hamas militants were firing from a UN school sheltering Gaza civilians in Jabalya, Democracy Now! reported Thursday.

Another four Palestinians died Wednesday from injuries sustained in the Israeli bombing of the school, bringing the death toll to forty-six. Another fifty-five were wounded.

“I’ve been authorized to say that the Israeli army, in private briefings with diplomats, is admitting that the firing that came out of Jabalya yesterday, the militant fire, was not from within the UNRWA school compound, it was from outside the UNRWA school compound. This is a crucial distinction,” said Gunness, UNRWA spokesperson.

“Those allegations are baseless. It, as far as we’re concerned, illustrates the need for a full and independent investigation. It’s been shown that these allegations … are completely baseless," added Gunness.

Middle-East-Online

Israel accused of using phosphorus shells in Gaza

LONDON - Israel is using white phosphorus shells in its offensive on the Gaza Strip, the Times newspaper reported on Thursday, citing photographic evidence despite Israeli denials.

The daily said it had identified stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells from photographs taken of Israel artillery units on the border with Gaza this week.

The report said Palestinian citizens had suffered burns caused by the weapons.

"The use of WP against civilians is prohibited under international law," the newspaper noted. It said it had identified pale blue shells marked with the designation M825A1 as a US-made WP munition.

Phosphorus ignites on contact with oxygen and, according to the Times, is being used by the Israeli military to create smokescreens to allow its ground forces to operate.

Middle-East-Online

Robert Fisk’s World: Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons

On both sides of the Atlantic the experience has been weirdly repetitive


It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel's propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies – we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes – don't realise the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza. Forget the 600 Palestinian dead; travelling on both sides of the Atlantic these past couple of weeks has been an instructive – not to say weirdly repetitive – experience.

Here's how it goes. I was in Toronto when I opened the right-wing National Post and found Lorne Gunter trying to explain to readers what it felt like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. "Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills," writes Gunter, "and people from the suburb of Scarborough – about 10 kilometres away – were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kid's school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist's office..."

Getting the message? It just so happens, of course, that the people of Scarborough are underprivileged, often new immigrants – many from Afghanistan – while the people of Don Mills are largely middle class with a fair number of Muslims. Nothing like digging a knife into Canada's multicultural society to show how Israel is all too justified in smashing back at the Palestinians.

Now a trip down Montreal way and a glance at the French-language newspaper La Presse two days later. And sure enough, there's an article signed by 16 pro-Israeli writers, economists and academics who are trying to explain what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. "Imagine for a moment that the children of Longueuil live day and night in terror, that businesses, shops, hospitals, schools are the targets of terrorists located in Brossard." Longueuil, it should be added, is a community of blacks and Muslim immigrants, Afghans, Iranians. But who are the "terrorists" in Brossard?

Two days later and I am in Dublin. I open The Irish Times to find a letter from the local Israeli ambassador, trying to explain to the people of the Irish Republic what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. Know what's coming? Of course you do. "What would you do," Zion Evrony asks readers, "if Dublin were subjected to a bombardment of 8,000 rockets and mortars..." And so it goes on and on and on. Needless to say, I'm waiting for the same writers to ask how we'd feel if we lived in Don Mills or Brossard or Dublin and came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft and Merkava tanks and thousands of troops whose shells and bombs tore 40 women and children to pieces outside a school, shredded whole families in their beds and who, after nearly a week, had killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 fatalities.

In Ireland, my favourite journalistic justification for this bloodbath came from my old mate Kevin Myers. "The death toll from Gaza is, of course, shocking, dreadful, unspeakable," he mourned. "Though it does not compare with the death toll amongst Israelis if Hamas had its way." Get it? The massacre in Gaza is justified because Hamas would have done the same if they could, even though they didn't do it because they couldn't. It took Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times's resident philosopher-in-chief, to speak the unspeakable. "When does the mandate of victimhood expire?" he asked. "At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?"

I had an interesting time giving the Tip O'Neill peace lecture in Derry when one of the audience asked, as did a member of the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society a day later, whether the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement – or, indeed, any aspect of the recent Irish conflict – contained lessons for the Middle East. I suggested that local peace agreements didn't travel well and that the idea advanced by John Hume (my host in Derry) – that it was all about compromise – didn't work since the Israeli seizure of Arab land in the West Bank had more in common with the 17th-century Irish Catholic dispossession than sectarianism in Belfast.

What I do suspect, however, is that the split and near civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has a lot in common with the division between the Irish Free State and anti-treaty forces that led to the 1922-3 Irish civil war; that Hamas's refusal to recognise Israel – and the enemies of Michael Collins who refused to recognise the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the border with Northern Ireland – are tragedies that have a lot in common, Israel now playing the role of Britain, urging the pro-treaty men (Mahmoud Abbas) to destroy the anti-treaty men (Hamas).

I ended the week in one of those BBC World Service discussions in which a guy from The Jerusalem Post, a man from al-Jazeera, a British academic and Fisk danced the usual steps around the catastrophe in Gaza. The moment I mentioned that 600 Palestinian dead for 20 Israeli dead around Gaza in 10 years was grotesque, pro-Israeli listeners condemned me for suggesting (which I did not) that only 20 Israelis had been killed in all of Israel in 10 years. Of course, hundreds of Israelis outside Gaza have died in that time – but so have thousands of Palestinians.

My favourite moment came when I pointed out that journalists should be on the side of those who suffer. If we were reporting the 18th-century slave trade, I said, we wouldn't give equal time to the slave ship captain in our dispatches. If we were reporting the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, we wouldn't give equal time to the SS spokesman. At which point a journalist from the Jewish Telegraph in Prague responded that "the IDF are not Hitler". Of course not. But who said they were?
Independent

Bush ordered ceasefire retreat at UN

Rice told to abstain in last-minute phone callfrom the White House

By David Usborne in New York


Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, was forced to step back from voting in favour of the Gaza ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council after orders from Washington, diplomatic sources said yesterday.

The US abstention on the resolution vote early yesterday, which clearly weakened its impact, was the final twist in a tumultuous three-day marathon of negotiations in New York.

For the UN to do nothing in the face of the mounting civilian casualties was becoming increasingly untenable. But when three of the world's top diplomats – Ms Rice, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner – descended on New York on Tuesday to take action there was plenty of reason to believe that their efforts would end in tears.

Most alarming was the prospect of a vote on a ceasefire text tabled by Libya. The US was threatening to veto it; nor indeed was America ready at that point to support any formal resolution in deference to Israel. But by Thursday morning, the US had had a surprising change of heart. It could back a resolution, if the British drafted one. Which Mr Miliband and his diplomatic crew duly did.

It fell to Mr Miliband, above all, to bring everyone on side before the council could hold a vote sometime Thursday evening. He, M. Kouchner and Ms Rice spent all day shuttling with knitted brows in and out of a conference room in the basement of the UN building where Arab foreign ministers were huddled. By dusk, it seemed at last that everyone was on board. Mr Miliband was smiling.

"Nothing is in the bag at the UN until everything is in the bag," one senior British official was heard remarking. Indeed. Once more the deal threatened to unravel as Americans muttered about new amendments and the French asked to delay the vote to give Israel time to consider its position. The Arabs almost rebelled. "It was hairy there for a moment," one source admitted.

When finally every last hurdle was cleared and the members of the Security Council were headed to their chamber for the vote, there was a mood of celebration in the building. Ministers from Arab nations especially were slapping backs. It was only in the last minutes before the vote was due that word began suddenly to circulate. America was not going to vote in favour after all.

It was no secret that Ms Rice had been on the phone with Washington and with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert all day. This was no run-of-the-mill vote, after all. The call that changed everything apparently came just as ministers and ambassadors were taking their seats in the council chamber. It was President George Bush for Ms Rice. Don't veto the resolution, he said, but don't vote for it either.

As Mr Miliband left later for the airport and the flight home, he could take heart, perhaps, from what Ms Rice said in the chamber. America supported the text and its goals, she insisted. And yet, the US could not vote for it because of that other special relationship it has; with Israel.
Independent

Winning the media war
Twitter, YouTube, blogs – Israel has proved a master of networking. Shame it's being used to promote a bloody conflict
Comments (103)

By Rachel Shabi


One of the things that annoyed Israel about the second Lebanon war was that it ended prematurely – without a clean Israeli victory against Hezbollah. The Jewish state considered that this, in part, was the result of a lily-livered international community balking at the sight of more than 1,000 civilian deaths – not to mention the devastation of Lebanese infrastructure – and deciding that enough was enough. Consequently, one of the recommendations of an Israeli committee investigating the war was that Israel set up an information/propaganda coordination body, to keep those pesky liberals on message even when bloody images of the victims of Israeli assaults were relayed across world media.

Israel's war on Gaza was the first time we saw the "hasbara" directive in action. A body set up to spin (or "explain", if you like) the country's justifications for the war, it tightly coordinated key messages and worked on so many levels – mainstream media as well as diplomatic channels, friendship leagues, YouTube, Twitter and the blogosphere – that the effect was epidemic. It got world media repeating the Israeli government's core messages practically verbatim. Those messages boil down to, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Hamas is a vile terrorist group; they started it, and you must support Israel's defensive war because we're civilised, just like you." For just one glimmer of the success rate, check how many of the US media talking heads collated by the Daily Show use the Israeli government's own analogy to explain the assaults on Gaza.

Palestinians didn't stand a chance against such coordination. Media monitors chastised the disproportionate use of Israel spokespeople over Palestinian ones in coverage of the assault. Campaigners gloomily forwarded emails with the message: "What we're up against." One email comprised a "language guide" issued by the Israel Project, advising supporters of how best to describe Hamas's "Iran-backed war on Israel". Another came from (or was forwarded by) an Israeli overseas mission, urging supporters to vote in a German newspaper's online poll on Gaza. The email warned that the longer the conflict continued, "more people here will be overwhelmed with mercy for poor Hamasnikkim". (For more on this, see here.)

Indeed, that's a core discussion within the Israeli media: how long have we got before the world forces us to stop? Reports, especially in the first week, comprised interviews with Israeli correspondents in Europe and the US commenting on how well the media had swallowed the Israeli message.

While Israeli PR is strong and strategic, Palestinian PR is hopeless. The rift between the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Hamas government in Gaza means that there are no clear messages and no real capacity to counter Israeli officials. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian MP and former information minister, holds this to be as a result of incompetence and a lack of political clarity. He says that Hamas don't know how to do media, while the PA "did not behave as it should, as a representative of all the Palestinian people. Their messages were either absent, weak or delayed". He laments the continued split between Fatah and Hamas. "They don't realise that in such a moment of crisis when their people are being slaughtered, they have to rise above it."

Palestinian commentators point to an obvious imbalance: Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza since the start of the war, effectively pulling the blinds over events within the strip. But Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib says there is another factor at play in the overall media skew. "Even if the Palestinian side came up with proper messages, Hamas has been successfully labelled by Israel as a terrorist group and is portrayed in the western media in a manner similar to al-Qaida," he says. As a result, western audiences are more prepared to sympathise with Israel – because it fits the "us or them" binary to which post 9/11 ears are attuned.

What all this shows us is how well Israel understands how western media works, how best to utilise its blind spots and prejudices. Israel clearly has the vision, the networking capacity and the resources to use world media to full effect. If I were the marketing manager of an ailing global product, I'd be taking notes. And we can only wonder what such talents could achieve if only the end goal were really peace, not war.
guardian

Enough. It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa.
By Naomi Klein
guardian

Israel's Czech mate
Given the Czech Republic's apparent pro-Israeli bias, the timing of its presidency of the EU is particularly unfortunate


By David Cronin


If Václav Havel needs inspiration for a new play, he could do worse than study the political farce that has marked the opening days of his country's first attempt to chair the European Union.

First, an official spokesman for the Czech Republic deems Israel's slaughter of Gazan civilians an act of self-defence. Next, the statement has to be retracted when it fails to chime with the message from Paris, which has reluctantly ceded the EU's presidency to Prague. And then an aristocrat fond of bow ties (Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg) leads a mission aimed at brokering a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. The snag is that "peace" has to be achieved without actually talking to Hamas because it has been designated a terrorist organisation.

I'm sure that thinktanks will be publishing pamphlets in the coming weeks that accuse the Czechs of damaging the EU's credibility. None the less, Prague's patent bias towards Israel is consistent with both its own foreign policy and the direction in which the union has been heading for some time.

A museum in Prague launched an exhibition a few years ago detailing how weapons made in Czechoslovakia assisted Israel's "war of independence" in 1948. Known as the "nakbah" or catastrophe to Palestinians, this involved the systematic destruction of Arab villages, with vast numbers of the refugees uprooted fleeing to Gaza.

As the country prepared for EU membership in 2004, Czech diplomats openly bragged of how they were continuing to arm Israel. In that year, the Czech Republic exported a Mi 24D helicopter to Israel. Fans of military porn, meanwhile, can marvel at videos on YouTube demonstrating the prowess of the Czech-designed Tatra trucks used by the Israeli army.

The Czechs' steadfast support for Israel sits uncomfortably with their apparently stout defence of human rights elsewhere. Invoking powerful historical memories from their own country, Czech ministers have demanded that the EU should support dissidents in Cuba. Yet they have failed to create a similar ruckus over how Israel detains school-leavers who resist military service or has denied journalists access to Gaza.

It would be wrong to chide the Czechs in isolation. All 27 EU governments agreed in December that their relations with Israel should be bolstered, ignoring a call from Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, to hold off on doing so until there was a freeze on settlements in the occupied territories. As a result of this decision, Israel could soon be offered the status of "privileged partner", allowing it take part in almost every EU programme open to countries that have not formally joined the union.

Even before its invasion of Gaza, there was no shortage of reasons why Israel should not have been rewarded in this way – but now?
guardian

Putting the record straight
Some cast us as 'soft jihadists', others as 'neocon Zionists'. But we know the integrity and value of Quilliam Foundation's work.
guardian

UN human rights chief accuses Israel of war crimes
Official calls for investigation into Zeitoun shelling that killed up to 30 in one house as Israelis dismiss 'unworkable' ceasefire

The United Nations' most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza. The warning came as Israeli troops pressed on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire.

Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for "credible, independent and transparent" investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were killed by Israeli shelling.

Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident "appears to have all the elements of war crimes".

The accusation came as Israel kept up its two-week-old air and ground offensive in Gaza and dismissed as "unworkable" the UN security council resolution which had called for "an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire".

Protests against the offensive were held across the world yesterday just as diplomacy to halt the conflict appeared to falter.

With the Palestinian casualty toll rising to around 800 dead, including 265 children, and more than 3,000 injured, fresh evidence emerged yesterday of the killings in Zeitoun. It was "one of the gravest incidents" since Israel's offensive began two weeks ago, the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs said yesterday.

"There is an international obligation on the part of soldiers in their position to protect civilians, not to kill civilians indiscriminately in the first place, and when they do, to make sure that they help the wounded," Pillay told Reuters. "In this particular case these children were helpless and the soldiers were close by," she added.

An Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, said the incident was still being examined. "We don't warn people to go to other buildings, this is not something we do," she said. "We don't know this case, we don't know that we attacked it."

Despite the intense bombardment, militants in Gaza fired at least 30 rockets into southern Israel yesterday. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, told al-Jazeera TV: "This resolution doesn't mean that the war is over. We call on Palestinian fighters to mobilise and be ready to face the offensive, and we urge the Arab masses to carry on with their angry protests."

Israeli officials said they could not be expected to halt their military operation while the rockets continued and said they first wanted an end to the rocket fire and a "mechanism" to prevent Hamas rearming in future.

"The whole idea that Israel will unilaterally stop protecting our people when Hamas is sending rockets into our cities to kill our people is not a reasonable request of Israel," said Mark Regev, spokesman for prime minister Ehud Olmert. Israel wanted security for its people in southern Israel, he said, and dismissed suggestions his military might seek to topple Hamas, saying they were "not in the regime-change business".

Israeli public opinion still strongly favours the war. One poll of Jewish Israelis yesterday, by the War and Peace Index, said 90% of the population supported continuing the operation until Israel achieved all its goals.

Olmert held a meeting of his security cabinet, and on the agenda was discussion about whether to intensify the offensive by launching a fresh stage of attacks in which Israeli troops would invade the major urban areas of Gaza as more reservists were called up. There was no word on the outcome.

So far 13 Israelis have been killed in this conflict, of whom three were civilians.

Another 23 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military yesterday. Seven from one family, including an infant, died when Israeli jets bombed a five-storey building in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. There was heavy aerial bombing and artillery fire across the territory.

More than 20,000 Gazans have fled their homes in the north of the strip and thousands more in the south. In some cases Israeli troops have told them to leave, or dropped leaflets warning them to evacuate their homes. Some are even dividing their families between different addresses for fear of losing them all in a single air strike.

"Many people are leaving their homes and moving to the centre of the cities," said Abdel Karim Ashour, 53, who works with a local aid agency, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. He, his wife and their four children fled their house on the coastal road in northern Gaza on the third day of the conflict. He sent the four children to stay with his brother while he and his wife are staying at a friend's house. "We were in an area of heavy shelling, so we left and I divided the family to try to reduce the victims if we face any trouble. We try and keep in touch by telephone but there are problems with the network," he said. "We're just hoping for a ceasefire. If the fighting goes on there will be more victims."
guardian

US abstention stuns security council


A UN resolution calling for an end to the fighting in Gaza was weakened at the last minute by a surprise US abstention, it emerged yesterday.

Diplomatic sources said the US was closely involved in the drafting of the security council resolution calling for a ceasefire and that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, had defended it in the face of pressure from Israel. The US abstention, at the final vote, stunned British and French diplomats.

The resolution, calling for a truce and a withdrawal of Israeli troops once a "durable" ceasefire had been achieved was passed 14-0, but the US abstention will soften its impact in Israel, where signals sent from Washington are carefully scrutinised and where an election is looming.

Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, issued a statement saying the resolution was "not practical" and the offensive against Hamas in Gaza would continue.

Israel opposed the resolution on the grounds that it put the state on an equal footing with Hamas, and did not give a complete guarantee against further attacks from Hamas rockets.

Thursday night's call from Washington ordering an abstention appears to have come after an eleventh-hour appeal to the White House from Olmert.

Hamas also dismissed the ceasefire proposal and said that whoever tried to enforce it on the ground would be forced to deal with the Islamist movement, underlining its determination to be recognised as a key player in the conflict.

Musa Abu Marzouk, Hamas's deputy political leader, accused the US of wanting to give Israel more time to achieve its goals in Gaza.

"This resolution was discussed in the hallways of the United Nations," he told Hezbollah's al-Manar TV from Damascus. "The movement was not consulted. Our vision and the interests of our people were not taken into consideration."

Analysts say Hamas fears a settlement being imposed on it and, like Israel, wants to be able to show that it has improved its position as a result of the fighting.

"They [the US] want to give the enemy more time, said Abu Marzouk. But I assure you that they will not achieve any of their goals and they will withdraw in disappointment and they will be defeated."

The resolution was supported by the Arab League, which had wanted tougher language but was ultimately satisfied that the ceasefire call was in the form of a resolution, legally binding albeit not directly enforceable, rather than a weaker security council presidential statement, as Britain and the US had initially proposed.

"That's the most you are ever going to get out of the security council process," said an Arab diplomat. "They've sucked the marrow out of it."

The text "stresses the urgency of and calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza".

It balanced a call for Israel to open the border crossings into Gaza with an appeal to UN members to police Gaza's border with Egypt to prevent arms smuggling.

In her remarks after the vote Rice made clear her backing for the resolution but said the US had abstained because it wanted to wait for the outcome of Egyptian and French mediation on the ground.

The incident marked the latest in a long line of issues on which the state department has been over-ruled by the White House, both under Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell.

The hard line taken in support of Israel by George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, has been maintained until the last days of the administration.

A senior European diplomat said US abstention nevertheless represented a qualified diplomatic victory for UN consensus. "Before they were going to veto, so to go from veto to a vote for a resolution was maybe too far," the diplomat said.

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, who had delayed his return to London to draft the text, said it would help bolster peace efforts in the region.

Syria was said to be urging Hamas not to accept Egyptian-French proposals for a ceasefire, arguing it should hold out for a deal that enhances its position via-a-vis Israel and Fatah, its Palestinian rival.
guardian

LORD LEVY: Bush showed near-zero interest in Middle East peace... it was nothing short of catastrophic

By Lord Levy
Mail

Yes, Israel has a right to exist. But so did those blood-soaked Palestinian toddlers on the mortuary slab
By Suzanne Moore
Mail