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GAZA CITY — A ceasefire between Israel and Islamic Jihad fighters in Gaza on Monday brought a tense calm to both areas, ending a three-day conflict that killed 44 Palestinians and demonstrating the precision of the US-backed Israeli missile defense system, officials said as the Iron Dome, keeping the number of Israeli casualties to zero.
“The United States is proud of our support for Israel’s Iron Dome, which has intercepted hundreds of missiles and saved countless lives,” President Biden said in a statement Sunday. Biden hailed the Egyptian-Qatar-brokered ceasefire, which began at 11:30 p.m. local time on Sunday, and praised Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid for his “steady leadership during the crisis.”
Though both sides claimed victory, the ceasefire promised no long-term solution to the 15-year standoff between the militant-controlled Gaza Strip and Israel — which, along with Egypt, has blocked the coastal enclave since 2007 and effectively traps more than 2 million people in an area roughly twice the size of the District of Columbia.
Barring a handful of cross-border gunfire in the minutes after the ceasefire began, the deal held until Monday, allowing humanitarian aid to reach Gaza for the first time since Israel halted supplies from outside early last week.
The dwindling power supply threatened to shut down hospitals while staff continued to treat the more than 350 wounded in the fighting. Although the first tankers crossed the Gaza Strip at 7:30 a.m. Monday, officials said it would take time to restart the 75-megawatt generator, which provides much of the Strip’s eight hours a day of electricity.
Residents of the Gaza Strip filled the streets on Monday, many emerging from their homes for the first time since Friday afternoon when surprise airstrikes ruined a day of prayers and beach trips. Stores were crowded with shoppers afraid to head out over the weekend, though dairy aisles and merchandise bins had yet to be stocked. It was still dark in most of the shops.
Retail blocks were busy, but niches of despair weren’t hard to find. Just off Mansoura Street, Riyad Qaddoum, 65, relived the moment he heard a loud explosion around the corner from his home on Friday. Investigating found the bodies of three people who were killed when two rockets hit a motorcycle driven by a suspected Islamic Jihad fighter. Among the dead was his 5-year-old granddaughter, Alaa Qaddoum. She had been standing in front of her aunt’s house, waiting for a walk in the park. Bloodstains and shrapnel marks still dotted the wall.
“Why couldn’t they wait until [the motorcycle] was away from the children?” Riyad Qaddoum said of the music from two crowded funeral tents on his street, one for Aala, another for a 60-year-old man who was sitting on the step of a mosque when the strike killed him. “She was looking forward to going to kindergarten.”
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 15 of the 44 killed in the Gaza Strip were children. Palestinian officials in Gaza said Israel was responsible for all the deaths.
The Israeli military has denied the Gaza account, saying the majority of the civilians killed over the weekend were hit by Islamic Jihad rockets, which misfired and landed in the Gaza Strip.
Even before the ceasefire, Israeli officials boasted Sunday morning that they had achieved tactical objectives, which they say included the assassination of two of Islamic Jihad’s top military commanders and airstrikes on more than 140 tunnels, weapons caches and missile defense systems. starting places. The operation also killed at least 10 other Islamic Jihad members, as well as three members of other Gaza-based militant organizations, according to an Islamic Jihad statement released on Monday.
“But the greatest achievement was a strategic victory: that we did what we wanted and finished when we wanted,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer in the Israeli military. “We were able to define a beginning, a middle and an end.”
The situation first flared up on Tuesday when Israeli forces arrested a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank. Soldiers also launched a wave of arrests against suspected Islamic Jihad members and made dozens of arrests near Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin and other West Bank locations.
On the same day, the Israeli military restricted movement in southern Israel and kept local communities in an effective exclusion zone as a security precaution. Israel will hold its fifth election in nearly four years in November, and Lapid, who has been prime minister for less than two months, has faced mounting pressure to crack down on Islamic Jihad as tensions escalated.
The air battle began Friday afternoon when Israel launched pre-emptive airstrikes against Islamic Jihad, which had positioned snipers and anti-tank missiles on the border to kill Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Hamas, the much larger Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, was notably absent from the weekend’s hostilities. In May last year, Hamas and Israel engaged in an 11-day conflict that killed more than 200 in Gaza and 12 in Israel.
While Hamas and Islamic Jihad are allies, the latter is seen as more ideologically extreme. Islamic Jihad has previously fired rockets at Israel to challenge Hamas leadership.
The Palestinian Authority, which rules parts of the West Bank and is a rival to both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, was also remarkably quiet as Gaza’s death toll mounted.
But the escalation threatened a broader confrontation between Israel and Iran, the main supporter of Islamic Jihad. While Iran has provided Islamic Jihad with funds, training and weapons, analysts said Iran likely played no direct role in igniting the fight; However, when it began, the Iranian leadership gave Islamic Jihad its full public support.
“Reality dictated that Palestinian Islamic Jihad had to stop firing, even though Iran encouraged it to continue,” said a senior Israeli diplomat involved in the mediation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the process speak.
The leader of the movement, Ziad Nakhaleh, arrived in Iran last week before violence flared up. On Saturday, he met with Ismail Qaani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees the country’s foreign military operations, who warned Israel is paying a “heavy price” for its attacks on Gaza.
In the three days of fighting, Islamic Jihad dropped around 1,100 rockets on Israel, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the international airport, according to the Israeli army.
“Islamic Jihad is stronger today,” Nakhaleh said at a press conference in Tehran on Sunday evening shortly before the ceasefire began. “All enemy cities were within range of our resistance missiles.”
Berger reported from Jerusalem. Rubin reported from Tel Aviv.