After Israel, Hamas reach Gaza cease-fire, both sides claim victory

TEL AVIV — Israel and the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip made dueling victory claims Wednesday night after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire ended a blistering week-long crackdown on militants in the Palestinian enclave.

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Correspondent Abigail Hauslohner in Gaza and columnist David Ignatius outline the possible elements of a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants.

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Gaza rocket attacks, Israeli airstrikes double from 2008 conflict

The deal averted a ground war that Israel had threatened, but it leaves the crux of the conflict unresolved, with neither side winning major concessions. The agreement restricts Israel from deploying ground troops or targeting militant leaders in Gaza, while Palestinian factions there are commanded to cease rocket attacks on Israel.

Although some details remained to be worked out, the terms addressed the most combustible elements in a dangerous cycle that had quickly escalated into the most serious clash since 2009 between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist group in Gaza.

After seven days in which hundreds of Palestinian rockets were fired into southern Israel and hundreds of Israeli airstrikes targeted Gaza, the United States and Egypt played key mediating roles in the accord, which was announced in Cairo after a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president.

The agreement came despite a fierce overnight barrage of airstrikes by Israel in Gaza and a midday bombing attack on a public bus in Tel Aviv that left 22 Israelis wounded and carried the potential to contribute to a worsening spiral.

The rubble-covered streets of densely populated Gaza thundered with the pops of celebratory gunfire as the truce went into effect at 9 p.m. local time, while the Israeli military pointed to its success in killing seven senior militants with air attacks as evidence of a battle triumph.

But both sides said they stood poised to resume fighting if the deal broke down, and it was clear that the truce had the potential to unravel. Several rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel after the cease-fire went into effect, Israeli media reported.

The tone of the victory claims by both sides showed the unrelenting hostility that remains between the foes. And the fighting had the potential to escalate into a broader regional war at a time when upheaval across the Middle East has added to a sense of instability.

“Their aim was to deter us,” senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal said of Israel on Wednesday night. “The resistance showed them. This deterrence has failed. Israel has failed in all of its goals, thanks to God.”

For its part, the Israeli military issued a statement saying the campaign, dubbed Pillar of Defense, had “accomplished its pre-determined objectives” by degrading Hamas’s command-and-control apparatus, devastating its infrastructure and destroying the network of tunnels used to smuggle weapons.

The military said Israeli airstrikes had “severely impaired’’ Hamas’s ability to launch rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip. In addition, it said the country’s new, U.S.-funded missile defense system, called Iron Dome, had intercepted 84 percent of 421 Palestinian rockets that would have otherwise landed in populated areas of Israel.