CAIRO (AP) — Israel and the Hamas militant group accepted an Egyptian cease-fire proposal Sunday, clearing the way for the resumption of talks on a long-term truce to end a month of heavy fighting in the Gaza Strip that has taken nearly 2,000 lives.

The announcement marked the second time in less than a week that the bitter enemies had agreed to Egyptian mediation. A similar three-day truce last week collapsed in renewed violence over the weekend.

The truce took effect at midnight (2101 GMT), preceded by heavy rocket fire toward Israel. In Cairo, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said the cease-fire would allow humanitarian aid into battered Gaza neighborhoods and the reopening of indirect talks on a more lasting and comprehensive deal.

Hamas is seeking an end to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade against Gaza, while Israel wants Hamas to dismantle its formidable arsenal of rockets and other weapons.

Palestinian negotiators accepted the proposal early Sunday after meeting with Egyptian officials throughout the weekend. Israeli officials concurred later. Both delegations are back in Cairo.

Qais Abdelkarim, a member of the Palestinian delegation, said indirect talks with the Israelis would begin Monday "with the hope of reaching a lasting cease-fire." The goal, he added, was to end the blockade, which he called "the reason for the war."

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Restricted from playing outside, displaced Palestinian children play indoors in a high-rise building …

The recent fighting has been the heaviest between Israel and Hamas since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. More than 1,900 Palestinians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians. On the Israeli side, 67 people have been killed, including three civilians. Nearly 10,000 people have been wounded and thousands of homes destroyed.

The fighting ended in a three-day cease-fire last Tuesday. Egypt had hoped to use that truce to mediate a long-term deal. But when it expired, militants resumed their rocket fire, sparking Israeli reprisals. The violence continued throughout the weekend, including a burst of fighting late Sunday ahead of the expected cease-fire.

The Israeli military reported some 30 rocket attacks from Gaza on Sunday. Palestinian medical officials said seven people were killed in Israeli airstrikes, including the bodyguard of a Hamas leader, the medical officials said.

Israel had walked away from cease-fire talks over the weekend. "Israel will not negotiate under fire," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier Sunday, warning that his country's military campaign "will take time."

Last week's talks failed in part because Israel rejected Hamas' demand for a complete end to the blockade. Israel says the closure is necessary to prevent arms smuggling, and officials do not want to make any concessions that would allow Hamas to declare victory.

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Firefighters try to extinguish fire after a cleaning materials factory was hit by an Israeli airstri …

A senior Palestinian negotiator acknowledged that the Palestinians would make more modest demands this time around. He said they will seek an end to the bloodshed in Gaza and an easing — but not an end — to the blockade.

"We might not get everything we want, particularly on freedom of movement. But we believe the Israelis and the world have gotten the point that Gazans should live normally and things should be much better than today," the negotiator said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal Palestinian deliberations.

Israel says Hamas must disarm. Hamas has said handing over its arsenal, which is believed to include several thousand remaining rockets, is out of the question.

The blockade has greatly limited the movement of Palestinians in and out of the impoverished territory of 1.8 million people for jobs and schooling. It has also limited the flow of goods into Gaza and blocked virtually all exports.

An Egyptian crackdown on smuggling tunnels along Gaza's southern border has made things even tougher by robbing Hamas of its key economic pipeline and weapons conduit. Gaza's unemployment rate surpasses 50 percent, and Hamas is unable to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of workers.

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Smoke raises over Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic …

An easing of the blockade could mean an increased role for Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose forces were ousted by Hamas seven years ago. Officials said the rival Palestinian factions were already exploring options that would give Abbas, who now governs in the West Bank, a foothold in Gaza, including the likely control of its border crossing with Egypt.

At a minimum, Israel will want guarantees that the rocket fire will stop. A 2012 cease-fire promised an easing of the blockade but was never implemented — in part because of sporadic rocket attacks by various armed factions in Gaza.

Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said Hamas could get the blockade lifted by accepting longstanding international demands to renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist.

"They want to get legitimacy as a terrorist organization without accepting the requirements of the international community," she told a news conference.

In the West Bank, Palestinian health officials said an 11-year-old boy was shot and killed Sunday by Israeli forces in a refugee camp near the city of Hebron.

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Smoke and dust rise after an Israeli strike in Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday, Aug. …

Witnesses and relatives of the boy said Israeli security forces opened fire at Palestinian stone-throwers. They said the boy was standing on the road in front of his home at the time.

The military said its forces encountered a "violent riot" and opened fire. It acknowledged that the boy was killed in the violence and said it was investigating.

The current Gaza war escalated from the abduction and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June. Israel blamed the killings on Hamas and launched a massive arrest campaign, rounding up hundreds of its members in the West Bank. Hamas and other militants unleashed rocket fire from Gaza.

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Associated Press writers Josef Federman in Jerusalem, Sarah El Deeb in Cairo, Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, and Daniel Estrin and Yousur Alhlou in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Israel, Hamas accept cease-fire proposal

The move clears the way for the resumption of indirect talks on a long-term truce after a month of heavy fighting.
Netanyahu's warning

Reuters Videos
Obama says mission in Iraq will "take some time"

By Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Special forces loyal to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki were deployed in strategic areas of Baghdad on Sunday night after he delivered a tough speech indicating he would not cave in to pressure to drop a bid for a third term, police sources said.

Pro-Maliki Shi'ite militias stepped up patrols in the capital, police said. An eyewitness said a tank was stationed at the entrance to Baghdad's Green Zone, which houses government buildings.

In a speech on state television, Maliki accused Iraq's Kurdish President Fouad Masoum of violating the constitution by missing a deadline for him to ask the biggest political bloc to nominate a prime minister and form a government.

"I will submit today an official complaint to the federal court against the president of the Republic for committing a clear constitutional violation for the sake of political calculations," said Maliki.

Serving in a caretaker capacity since an inconclusive election in April, Maliki has defied calls by Sunnis, Kurds, some fellow Shi'ites, regional power broker Iran and Iraq's top cleric for him to step aside for a less polarising figure.

Critics accuse Maliki of pursuing a sectarian agenda which has sidelined Sunnis and prompted some of them to support Islamic State militants, whose latest sweep through northern Iraq has alarmed the Baghdad government and its Western allies.

Washington seems to be losing patience with Maliki, who has placed Shi'ite political loyalists in key positions in the army and military and drawn comparisons with executed former dictator Saddam Hussein, the man he plotted against from exile for years.

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Kurdish peshmerga troops participate in an intensive security deployment against Islamic State milit …

A senior U.S. official said on Sunday he fully supported Masoum after Maliki, who the United States has blamed for stoking Iraq's security crisis, criticised him.

"Fully support President of Iraq Fouad Masoum as guarantor of the Constitution and a (prime minister) nominee who can build a national consensus," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk, the State Department point man for Iraq, said on his Twitter feed.

U.S. President Barack Obama urged Iraqi politicians on Saturday to form a more inclusive government that can counter the growing threat from the Islamic State. But Maliki keeps digging in.

"Now we can see unprecedented deployment of army commandos and special elite forces deployed in Baghdad, especially sensitive areas close to the green zone and the entrances of the capital," one of the police sources said.

"These forces are now taking full responsibility of securing these areas of the capital."

Iraq's Interior Ministry has told police to be on high alert in connection with Maliki's speech, a police official told Reuters.

The Islamic State has capitalised on political deadlock and sectarian tensions that have made it easier for the group to make fresh gains after arriving in the north in June from Syria.

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President Barack Obama meets with the National Security Council in the Situation Room of the White H …

The group, which sees Shi'ites as infidels who deserve to be killed, has ruthlessly moved through one town after another, using tanks and heavy weapons it seized from soldiers who fled in the thousands.

Islamic State militants have killed hundreds of Iraq's minority Yazidis, burying some alive and taking women as slaves, an Iraqi government minister said on Sunday, as U.S. warplanes again bombed the insurgents.

Human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani accused the Sunni Muslim insurgents - who have ordered the community they regard as "devil worshippers" to convert to Islam or die - of celebrating what he called a "a vicious atrocity".

No independent confirmation was available of the killings of hundreds of Yazidis, bloodshed that could increase pressure on Western powers to do more to help tens of thousands of people, including many from religious and ethnic minorities, who have fled the Islamic State's offensive.

The U.S. Central Command said drones and jet aircraft had hit Islamic State armed trucks and mortar positions near Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region which had been relatively stable throughout the past decade of turmoil until the insurgents swept across northwestern Iraq this summer.

That marked a third successive day of U.S. air strikes, and Central Command said in its statement that they were aimed at protecting Kurdish peshmerga forces as they face off against the militants near Arbil, the site of a U.S. consulate and a U.S.-Iraqi joint military operations centre.

The U.S. State Department said on Sunday it had pulled some of its staff from the Arbil consulate for their safety.

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Sailors guide an F/A-18C Hornet assigned to the Valions of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 15 on the f …

The Islamists' advance in the past week has forced tens of thousands to flee, threatened Arbil and provoked the first U.S. attacks since Washington withdrew troops from Iraq in late 2011, nearly nine years after invading to oust Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi rights minister Sudani told Reuters in a telephone interview that accounts of the killings had come from people who had escaped the town of Sinjar, an ancient home of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking community whose religion has set them apart from Muslims and other local faiths.

"We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar," he said.

"Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar."

Consolidating a territorial grip that includes tracts of Syrian desert and stretches toward Baghdad, the Islamic State's local and foreign fighters have swept into areas where non-Sunni groups live. While they persecute non-believers in their path, that does not seem to be the main motive for their latest push.

The group wants to establish religious rule in a caliphate straddling Syria and Iraq and has tapped into widespread anger among Iraq's Sunnis at a democratic system dominated by the Shi'ite Muslim majority following the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Obama warned on Saturday that there was no quick fix for the crisis that threatens to tear Iraq apart.

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Displaced people, who fled from the violence in the province of Nineveh, arrive at Sulaimaniya provi …

Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani urged his allies to send arms to help his forces hold off the militants, who have bases across the Syrian border. During a visit by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Barzani said: "We are not fighting a terrorist organisation, we are fighting a terrorist state."

Another senior Kurdish official said Kurds retook two towns southwest of Arbil, Guwair and Makhmur, with the help of U.S. strikes. But he did not expect a rapid end to the fighting.

In Jalawla, 115 km (70 miles) northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed 10 Kurdish forces and wounded 80 people on Sunday. Kurdish fighters and Islamic militants are locked in fierce clashes in the town.

Fabius, noting how Islamic State fighters had taken the upper hand after seizing heavy weaponry from Iraqi troops who fled in June, said the European Union would look into bolstering the Kurds' arsenal to help them hold out and hit back.

TAKEN AS "SLAVES"

Sudani said: "The terrorist Islamic State has also taken at least 300 Yazidi women as slaves and locked some of them inside a police station in Sinjar and transferred others to the town of Tal Afar. We are afraid they will take them outside the country.

"In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses," he added. "This is a vicious atrocity."

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Kurdish "peshmerga" troops stand guard during an intensive security deployment at the chec …

U.S. military aircraft have dropped relief supplies to tens of thousands of Yazidis who are trapped on the desert top of nearby Mount Sinjar, seeking shelter from the insurgents.

A spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in Iraq said some 30,000 Iraqis had since Friday reached safety in Kurdistan after travelling on the Syrian side of the border from Sinjar.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis held a silent prayer for victims of the Iraq conflict: "Thousands of people, among them many Christians, banished brutally from their houses, children dying of hunger and thirst as they flee, women kidnapped, people massacred, violence of all kinds," he said in a Sunday address.

"All of this deeply offends God and deeply offends humanity."

MALIKI CRITICISM

France joined the calls for Iraq's feuding leaders to form an inclusive government capable of countering the militants.

"Iraq is in need of a broad unity government," Foreign Minister Fabius said in Baghdad. "All Iraqis should feel they are represented to take part in this battle against terrorism."

The pressure from France came a day after Obama described the upheaval in the north as a "wake-up call" to Iraqis who have slipped back into sectarian bloodshed not seen since 2006-2007.

Nearly every day police report kidnappings, bombings and execution-style killings in many cities, towns and villages. In Baghdad, police were on Sunday manning some squares in armoured personnel carriers, an unusual sight.

The Islamic State has met little resistance. Thousands of U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers fled when its Arab and foreign fighters swept through northern Iraq from eastern Syria in June.

The collapse of the Iraqi army prompted Kurds and Shi'ite militias to step in, with limited success.

The Sunni militants routed Kurds in their latest advance with tanks, artillery, mortars and vehicles seized from fleeing Iraqi troops, calling into question the Kurds' reputation as fearsome warriors.

Iranian-trained Shi'ite militias may stand a better chance than the Kurds but they are accused of kidnapping and killing Sunnis, playing into the hands of the Islamic State, which also controls a large chunk of western Iraq.

After hammering Kurdish forces last week, the militants are just 30 minutes' drive from Arbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital, which until now has been spared the sectarian bloodshed that has scarred other parts of Iraq for a decade.

The possibility of an attack on Arbil has prompted foreigners working for oil companies to leave the city and Kurds to stock up on AK-47 assault rifles at the arms bazaar.

In their latest sweep through the north, the Sunni insurgents seized a fifth oil field, several more villages and the biggest dam in Iraq - which could give them the ability to flood cities or cut off water and power supplies - hoisting their black flags up along the way.

After spending more than $2 trillion on its war in Iraq and losing thousands of soldiers, the United States must now find ways to tackle a group that is even more hardline than al-Qaeda and has threatened to march on Baghdad.

(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan in Washington; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Defiant Iraqi PM deploys special forces in Baghdad

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says he will not cave in to pressure to drop a bid for a third term.
U.S. backs country's president

The United States launched another round of air strikes Sunday against Islamic militants in Iraq, destroying several armed vehicles, according to the Defense Department.

The five attacks by U.S. fighter jets and drones destroyed four armed Islamic State vehicles -- starting with one that was firing on Kurdish forces near the city of Irbil.

The U.S. military said the air strikes took place from about 2:15 a.m. to 7:25 a.m. EDT Sunday.

President Obama ordered the strikes to protect U.S. personnel and religious minorities facing a possible "genocide" in northern Iraq.

On Sunday, the second strike hit an armed truck trying to leave the vicinity of the first truck, and an Islamic State “mortar position” was destroyed about an hour later, U.S. Central Command said.

The fourth strike occurred at about 5:45 a.m. when a U.S. aircraft fired and hit another Islamic State armed vehicle.

The fifth-and-final strike, at 7:25 a.m., damaged another one of the group's armed vehicles.

Officials said the missions were successful and that “all aircraft exited the strike areas safely.”

The air strikes follow four Saturday including one that hit an Islamic State armored personnel carrier, bringing the total number of reported strikes to 10 since Friday.

The weekend strikes came as President Obama prepared Americans for a sustained military involvement in Iraq, saying Saturday that the United States is ready to continue with air strikes to protect U.S. diplomats and citizens and others under attack from the Islamic State.

"I don't think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks," the president said on the South Lawn of the White House. “This is going to be a long-term project.”

On Sunday, the State Department said it relocated some staff members from the Embassy in Baghdad and the Consulate General in Irbil to the Consulate General in Basra and the Iraq Support Unit in Amman, Jordan. The embassy in Baghdad and the Consulate General in Irbil are still operating.

The Islamic State extremists have captured hundreds of Yazidi women, according to an Iraqi official, while thousands of other civilians, including Kurds and Christians,have fled into the mountains and elsewhere as the militants in recent days have seized a string of northern towns and villages.

Yazidis belong to ancient religion seen by the Islamic State group as heretical. The extremist group considers Shiite Muslims apostates, and has demanded Christians either convert to Islam or pay a special tax.

Obama acknowledged Saturday that providing a "safe corridors" for those who face a potential “genocide” will be difficult.

"That may take some time," he said. "Moving them is not simple in this unstable environment."

The air strikes mark the deepest U.S. engagement in the country since the troop withdrawal in late 2011.

The latest mission in Iraq also has a humanitarian component.

U.S. cargo planes have since Friday reportedly made three airdrops of food and water for thousands of Iraqi citizens threatened by Islamic State.

England and France have also joined in the humanitarian effort.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

DONETSK, Ukraine — Ukraine pressed ahead on Sunday with its military assault to stamp out pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country with its most intensive artillery bombardment of this rebel capital yet.

The attack with artillery and ground-to-ground rockets defied Russian threats to intervene here as the civilian death toll rose.

It also reinforced the Ukrainian leadership’s rejection of a cease-fire on humanitarian grounds offered on Saturday by the head of the main pro-Russian separatist group here, the Donetsk People’s Republic. The separatist leadership clarified Sunday that the cease-fire offer had covered only so-called green routes, or roads used by evacuees.

Still, Ukraine’s outright rebuff of the proposal only added to concerns that Russia would intervene with what the authorities in Moscow are calling a humanitarian mission but what European nations and the United States would view as an invasion, analysts said. Secretary of State John Kerry has cautioned Russia against intervening on the “pretext” of providing aid.

Through the day on Sunday, artillery shells rained down on three districts of Donetsk, hitting a rebel checkpoint and leaving it swathed in smoke, but also striking houses, apartment buildings and the maternity ward of the city’s main hospital.

Shells killed at least one civilian in the city. Roma Pronyakin, 37, was at home with his mother, watching TV, when their living room was struck. His mother, Alla, stood on the road in a state of shock. “I had one son, and now I have none,” she said.

A pro-Ukrainian paramilitary group called the Azov battalion, one of a half-dozen such organizations positioned around the city and used for urban combat, said Sunday that its fighters had raided the Ilovaisky district of the city, but pulled back.

The Ukrainian military said it had engaged in 30 firefights with the pro-Russian separatists in the previous 24 hours.

“The terrorists who are still active in Donetsk and Luhansk regions should lay down their arms and not bring up empty conversations about cease-fires,” a Ukrainian military spokesman said in Kiev, according to Ukrinform, the state news agency.

“If they want to take initiative, it is realized in a practical way, not with words, but by raising a white flag and laying down arms,” the spokesman said. “In this case, nobody will shoot the terrorists.”

The city’s main hospital, known as Hospital No. 1, was struck Sunday by artillery fire for a second time in recent days. It has the misfortune of falling right in the center of a line of fire between Ukrainian positions outside the city and the rebel military headquarters.

In the previous strike on the hospital, on Thursday, shells hit the dental ward, killing one patient, destroying a pediatric wing and sending people running into the street midway through their dental work.

On Sunday, the explosions and flying shrapnel blew out windows in the maternity ward. Tragedy was averted only because the deputy head doctor, Marina Ovsyanik, had evacuated 52 new and expecting mothers into the basement the night before, even though one woman was already in labor. She gave birth to a healthy boy in the basement, Dr. Ovsyanik said.

As Larisa Faleyeva cradled her 4-day-old daughter at the hospital, she said she thought these early traumatic days of conflict would bring the girl a special fate in life. “I hope and ask God to give her a peaceful life,” she said.