RIYADH: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and said they would attend an Arab economic summit in Kuwait next week to discuss the Israeli attacks that have left close to 1,000 people dead and thousands of civilians injured.
King Abdullah supported Egypt’s initiative to achieve a truce in Gaza. “The two leaders agreed that there must be immediate cease-fire and there must be complete implementation of the Egyptian initiative,” said a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency.
Ahmed Aboul Gheith, Egyptian foreign minister, said that Riyadh and Cairo would take part in the Arab summit in Kuwait beginning Monday “to realize Arab interests and to deal with the Palestinian issue in a way that ends the aggression and establishes peace in Gaza and eventually in the whole region.” He said the Kingdom and Egypt were exerting all efforts to reach a cease-fire, end Israeli aggression and open safe corridors to deliver assistance to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
Yesterday’s talks here and the contacts made with other world leaders, he said, also aimed “to mobilize the international community to support the Egyptian initiative in order to stop the bloodshed in Palestine.”
Saudi Ambassador to Egypt Hisham M. Nazir said that the Saudi Embassy in Egypt had launched a massive relief operation in coordination with Egyptian authorities. The first phase of the Saudi relief work began with the dispatch of a convoy of 63 trucks loaded with food, tents and medical supplies as well as 30 ambulances for Gaza. A Saudi medical evacuation plane also arrived here yesterday from Arish Airport carrying nine injured Palestinians accompanied by their relatives, said Dr. Khaled Al-Mirghalani, spokesman for the Health Ministry.
The Saudi-Egyptian summit followed a meeting of health ministers of Arab countries, who also discussed Israel’s war on Palestinians.
As the Arab leaders pressed for a cease-fire, hundreds of terrified people living in Rafah fled for their lives after a wave of ferocious Israeli airstrikes along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Witnesses said the bombardment followed airdrop of leaflets by the Israeli Air Force warning Palestinians it was about to carpet-bomb the area.
“There have been more than 60 airstrikes along the border and my house has been partly destroyed,” said Mohammed Ismael, 28, who has taken his family to stay with relatives in another part of the city.
“There are continuous airstrikes along the Egyptian border. About 60 families have all fled their houses which are situated several hundred meters from the border,” Jawad Harb, a Palestinian working for the international aid agency CARE, said as a series of deafening blasts echoed in the background.
Western diplomats have said Israeli military plans in the Gaza Strip include the option of retaking a narrow stretch of land called the Philadelphi Corridor that separates the coastal enclave from Egypt. With no end in sight to the 18-day-old war, the Gaza death toll rose to 952 and residents said the territory had run out of burial spaces. “We couldn’t find anywhere to bury my cousin,” Mahmoud Al-Zinati said, as he sat on the edge of a tomb in Gaza. “So we’ve opened the grave of another cousin who was martyred two years ago to bury this one.”
“I can’t describe my feelings. No one can feel what I am going through,” the 23-year-old said as he broke off his digging at the Sheikh Redwan Cemetery. “No one can feel how sad I am.” His 16-year-old cousin, killed in an airstrike, he says, will rest above another cousin, also killed in violence in the Palestinian enclave two years ago, at the age of 12.
The big Sheikh Redwan graveyard, like others in the city of Gaza, is packed with white stone tombstones and a sign on the wall outside tells families in plain terms: “Cemetery Full.”
Meanwhile, the Pentagon said it had to cancel a planned shipment of munitions from a Greek port to a US warehouse in Israel due to objections from Athens. The Greek “government had some objection to offloading that shipment in their country,” spokesman Geoff Morrell told a news conference.
He said the shipment to the US warehouse had been agreed before the current Israeli offensive in Gaza and that Washington was now looking for an alternative.
— With input from agencies
