Gaza crisis: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls for ceasefire

United Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday called for an immediate ceasefire as Israel’s pounding of Gaza enters its sixth day, killing 31 in the last 24 hours.

Ban Ki-moon said he was going to Cairo to join talks about a possible truce as the recent raids on Gaza Strip had killed as many as eighty Palestinians.

With Egypt at the centre of efforts to broker a ceasefire, Palestinian officials said it was possible a deal would be reached in the days to come. But there was no letup in the bloodshed in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

The reports quoting medics said women and children accounted for most of Sunday’s dead, among them five babies and toddlers, killed in Israeli air strikes.

In the day’s most lethal raid, at least nine members of the same family — five of them children — were among 10 people killed when an Israeli missile destroyed a family home in Gaza City, the health ministry said.

At the scene, medics and bystanders all pitched in to remove the rubble to dig out the bodies in the hope of finding survivors, as people watched in shock, some weeping openly. The latest violence hiked the Palestinian casualty toll to 77 dead and 700 injured in some 100 hours of raids, while three Israelis have been killed and more than 50 injured by rocket fire since Wednesday.

An Israeli air strike in the early hours of Monday morning leveled the Abbas police headquarters in Gaza City, but nobody was killed. With Israel warning it could further escalate its operations in Gaza, US President Barack Obama on Sunday said it was preferable for the Gaza crisis to be resolved without a “ramping up” of Israeli military activity.

Security officials in Cairo said an Israeli envoy had also arrived in the Egyptian capital on Sunday for the talks. So far, the military says it has struck more than 1,132 targets in the Gaza Strip, without saying how many strikes it had carried out.

In the same period, 544 rockets fired by Gaza militants have stuck southern Israel, and another 302 have been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defence system.

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Posted by Web Desk on Nov 19 2012. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.