Palestinian factions agree on truce
Foreign Desk Report

GAZA CITY—Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said Friday that Palestinian factions had agreed to halt rocket fire if Israel reciprocates by stopping its military offensives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, rejected the proposal as “ludicrous,” and called on the Palestinians to come up with a more realistic plan for halting the cycle of violence. Palestinian militant factions — including the ruling Hamas group — have often agreed among themselves to halt violence against Israel should the military respond in kind, a proposal that has failed time and again to bring an end to the fighting.
On Thursday, the factions again met and reached a deal to halt rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, activity that has led Israel to launch a broad offensive into the coastal area. But on Friday, violence in the Gaza Strip continued unabated with Israeli soldiers killing two Palestinians, including a 10-year-old boy, and militants firing at least two rockets at Israeli towns bordering the Gaza Strip. The deaths came a day after a 64-year-old Palestinian grandmother blew herself up alongside Israeli troops operating in northern Gaza, killing herself and lightly wounding two soldiers.
Haniyeh said Palestinians would not shoulder the responsibility of the truce. “The ball now is in the Israeli court,” Haniyeh said. “It (Israel) must stop its aggression and escalation against the Palestinian people, then there will be no problem according to what the factions agreed in their last meeting.” Haniyeh was scheduled to meet faction leaders again later Friday, and the sides hoped to draw up a written truce proposal, officials said.
Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the Palestinians will not initiate a truce in any case. “There is no room for a truce while the aggression continues,” Barhoum said. “Israel must first stop its aggression, lift the siege and release prisoners.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently got involved in efforts to nail down a cease-fire, and will hopefully come up with a more serious proposal that Israel could respond to, Eisin said.
“Israel wants calm in the Gaza Strip,” Eisin said. “We’ll see if there are more concrete proposals”. Ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of his murder on Friday in a statement read out the morning after he died of an unknown poison in a London hospital. “You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done,” Litvinenko said in a statement read out by friends.
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics claim.” Britain’s Home Office (interior ministry) said police believed his death was caused by “the presence of a radioactive substance in his body” and had brought in experts to search for radioactive residue at a number of locations. Litvinenko, now a British citizen, fell ill on November 1 after meetings with another Russian ex-spy at a London hotel and an Italian magistrate at a downtown sushi bar. The Kremlin insisted it had nothing to do with the killing. But the allegation Moscow sent secret agents to murder a man in Britain for the first time since the Cold War cast a shadow over Putin’s appearance at an EU summit in Helsinki.