Hamas: Gaza militant groups agree to cease-fire with Israel – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Official in Gaza says Egypt helped broker cease-fire to go into effect on Sunday evening, which would end the three-day round of violence with Israel.

By The Associated Press

A Hamas official in Gaza says that all of Gaza’s militant groups have agreed to a cease-fire aimed at ending a three-day round of violence with Israel.

The official says Egypt helped broker the cease-fire, which will go into effect this evening. He says Egypt told the groups that Israel would halt its airstrikes only if the Palestinian groups stopped shooting first, and that Hamas security personnel would enforce the agreement.

	Emergency personnel at the site of a direct Grad rocket hit on a home in Be’er Sheva, in which one person was killed.
	Photo by: Eliyahu Hershkovitz

He spoke on condition of anonymity Sunday because the agreement had not officially been made public.

Foreign funds for Hamas hit by Syria unrest: diplomats | Reuters.

(Reuters) – Iran has cut back or even stopped its funding of Hamas after the Islamist movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, failed to show public support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, diplomats said on Sunday.

Hamas has denied that it is in financial crisis but says it faces liquidity problems stemming from inconsistent revenues from tax collection in the Gaza Strip and foreign aid.

The movement is spurned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel and renounce violence. It receives undisclosed sums of cash from Iran, which has acknowledged providing financial and political support to Hamas.

One diplomat, who asked not to be identified, said intelligence reports showed that Iran had reduced funding for Hamas.

Other diplomatic sources, also relying on intelligence assessments, said the payments had stopped over the past two months.

The diplomats cited Iran’s displeasure over Hamas’ refusal to hold rallies in support of Tehran’s ally, Assad, in Palestinian refugee camps in Syria after an uprising against his rule. Hamas’ leadership outside the Gaza Strip is headquartered in Damascus.

Hamas is also widely believed to receive money from the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most popular and organized political force. Diplomats said those payments also may have been reduced because the Brotherhood has diverted funds to support the so-called Arab Spring revolts.

In a sign of a cash crunch, the Hamas government in Gaza has failed to pay the July salaries of its 40,000 employees in the civil service and security forces. Hamas leaders promised full payments in August, but not all employees received their wages as scheduled on Sunday.

In 2010, Hamas put its Gaza budget at $540 million, with local revenues from taxes on merchants and on goods brought in from Israel and through smuggling tunnels under the Egyptian border accounting for only $55 million.

Since seizing the Gaza Strip in 2007 from forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement, Hamas has run several investment projects in former Israeli settlements in the enclave.

They include farms, greenhouses, entertainment facilities and restaurants in areas from which Israel withdrew in 2005.

Iran: Priced Out Of Power.

Aharonovitch: Violence in south l… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

    Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said on Sunday that the violence in the South will continue in the near future.

“The escalation will continue in the coming days. The public should act accordingly. These will not be easy times,” he said.

The public security minister, speaking from Ashkelon during a visit to attack victims there, was referring the current barrage of rockets being launched at southern population centers from the Gaza Strip.

Also on Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said that, in light of the ongoing onslaught, the government will have to consider entering the coastal strip.

“We cannot continue in a situation in which one million Israelis are living under constant rocket fire. The deterrence from Operation Cast Lead has exhausted itself. We will need to respond and we are not excluding the option of a ground invasion,” Shalom said.

The deputy prime minister made these statements from Beersheba’s Soroka University Medical Center, where he was visiting people wounded in rocket attacks over the weekend.

MKs call for IDF operation in Gaza as rocket barrage against Israel continues – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Opposition members from Kadima call for launch of extensive operation in the Gaza Strip after over a hundred rockets fall in Israel over weekend.

Members of Knesset from Israel’s opposition party, Kadima, urged the cabinet on Sunday to launch a military campaign in the Gaza Strip, following the barrage of rockets that struck Israel over the weekend and the deadly terrorist attack that predeced on Thursday.

At a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, committee chair MK Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) said that Israel must take steps against Hamas, “topple their infrastructures and create a system of ties with Egypt in order to prevent terrorism coming from its border.”

	Israeli soldiers take part in a military operation overnight in the West Bank city of Hebron on August 21, 2011.
	Photo by: AFP

MK Yohanan Plesner, also from Kadima, said the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will support a large-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip. “Creating a fixed reality of attrition in the south will constitute a victory for Hamas and the terrorist organizations,” he said. “The state of Israel cannot put up with such a situation.”

Head of Kadima party Tzipi Livni made a similar call on Saturday, saying the party will support an extensive military campaign. “You must use force against terrorism,” she said. “Just as we have taken steps against terrorism in the past, we will also support steps now that will defend the citizens of Israel.”

MK Avi Dichter (Kadima) said in the meeting that “following recent events, the world should think hard before recognizing a Palestinian state.” Labor Party MK Amir Peretz said Israel should add another ten Iron Dome system, adding that “we must protect the lives of citizens.”

Nine rockets and a barrage of mortar shells were fired from the Gaza Strip at southern Israel over the course of Saturday night and Sunday morning. The Iron Dome system successfully shot down one rocket aimed at Be’er Sheva and another three targeting the city of Ashkelon.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 21, 2011, 11:02 AM (GMT+02:00)

Iran’s trap for Israel on Eilat Highway

The role of Iran and Hizballah in manipulating the ongoing Palestinian war on Israel from Gaza is manifest, debkafile‘s military sources report. They planned, orchestrated and funded the coordinated attacks on the Eilat Highway Thursday, Aug. 18 – in which gunmen shot dead eight Israelis and injured 40 – and its sequel: volleys of 90 missiles launched day and night from Gaza against a million Israeli civilians since then.

Yossi Ben-Shoshan, 38, from Ofakim, was killed by one of the dozen Grad missiles hitting Beersheba and his home town Saturday night. More than a dozen people were injured, at least one critically.
The prime mover in the missile blitz is Tehran’s Palestinian arm, the Jihad Islami, which is responsible for 90 percent of the launches. Hamas is left on the sidelines, cut off for the first time from top levels of authority in Tehran and Damascus.

The IDF is held back from substantive action to snuff out the Iran-backed offensive by the indecision at the policy-making level of the Israeli government, which is still feeling its way toward determining the dimensions and potential thrust of the military crisis landing on Israel out of the blue.

Under Egyptian, Israeli and US noses, Tehran managed to transfer to its Palestinian arm in Gaza, the Jihad Islami, more than 10,000 missiles well in advance of the violence launched three days ago. Most of them are heavy Grads bringing Beersheba, capital of the Negev and Israel’s 7th largest town (pop. 200,000), within their 30-kilometer range for a sustained, massive missile offensive.
Tehran has now launched the hardware smuggled into the Gaza Strip ready for a Middle East war offensive for five objectives:

1. To leave Syrian President Bashar Assad free to continue brutalizing his population and ignoring President Barack Obama’s demand backed by Europe that he step down.
2. To manufacture a direct military threat on the Jewish state, whose destruction is a fundamental of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ideology.

3.  To thwart the Egyptian military junta’s operation last week for regaining control of the lawless Sinai Peninsula and destroying the vast weapons smuggling network serving Iran in its capacity as the leading international sponsor of terror.
4.  To render the Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his bid for UN recognition of an independent state on Sept. 20 irrelevant.  His isolation was brought home to him last Thursday by the coordinated Palestinian terrorist attacks near Eilat last Thursday.
5.  To plant ticking bombs around Israel for potential detonation and explosion into a full-blown regional war.
debkafile‘s Washington sources disclose that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined this peril to Egypt’s military ruler, Field Marshall Muhammad Tantawi, Saturday night, Aug. 20, to dissuade him from recalling the Egyptian ambassador to Israel over the deaths of three or five Egyptian police in the melee over the Palestinian terror attack near the Sinai border.
This danger was on the table of Israel’s inner cabinet of eight ministers when they met early Sunday to decide on IDF action for terminating the Palestinian missile war.

However, just as Cairo discovered that its operation for eradicating al Qaeda and other Islamist radical groups’ grip on Sinai would give Iran the pretext for aggression, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the IDF high command found themselves at a loss to determine whom to attack.
Up until now, Israel declared the Hamas rulers of Gaza accountable for all attacks originating in the enclave.
That formula is no longer valid. The Eilat Highway attacks were planned and executed behind Hamas’s back and so was the missile offensive – until Saturday night, when Hamas decided to try and step in. Both Hamas and Cairo are in fact out of the picture.
Israel’s leaders are stuck for solutions because no one in Washington, Jerusalem or Cairo can be sure of the outcome of any military steps they might take. They can’t be sure whether they will douse the violence or just play into the hands of Hizballah and Tehran who may have more shockers in their quivers ready to loose.
Only three facts stand out from the fog of uncertainty:
First, the security crisis besetting Israel has the dangerous potential for dragging the Middle East into a regional war.
Second, America and Israel are paying in full the price of their quiescence in the face of Iranian, Hizballah and extremist Palestinian belligerence and active preparations for war, including the stockpiling of thousands of increasingly sophisticated weaponry on Israel’s borders.
Third, the first step an Israeli soldier or tank takes into the Gaza Strip to silence Jihad Islami’s  missile fire is more likely than not to precipitate a second Iranian-orchestrated assault on another of Israel’s borders.
Sunday morning, no one in any of the capitals concerned was ready to risk guesstimating how far Tehran was ready to go in its current offensive and what orders Hizballah and its Palestinian puppets had received.