Israel Faces Increasing Pressure to Halt Gaza War.
JERUSALEM — Israel faced new political and economic pressures on Wednesday to negotiate a halt to the 16-day-old Gaza war, with its rising toll of death and destruction, as cease-fire talks ground forward and the Israeli tourism industry was upended as major foreign airlines extended their suspension of flights over fears of Palestinian rocket fire.
Secretary of State John Kerry, whose efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement collapsed this year, conducted a whirlwind tour of diplomacy, holding intensive talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after having met in the occupied West Bank with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. But for the moment, the prospects for a cease-fire seemed remote.
“We will continue to push for this cease-fire,” Mr. Kerry said in Ramallah, where Mr. Abbas is based. “We have in the last 24 hours made some progress in moving toward that goal.” But several hours later Mr. Kerry shook hands with a grim-faced Mr. Netanyahu at the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces in Tel Aviv.
Neither of them took questions before or after a two-hour meeting. Mr. Kerry then flew back to Cairo, where he had spent part of Tuesday in discussions with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whose cease-fire proposal had provided the framework for discussions on how to arrange one.
While Mr. Kerry has emphasized that his immediate goal is to obtain a cease-fire, he also has said that he hopes to lay the ground for a “sustainable process going forward” following an end to the fighting. That seemed to be a way to assure the Palestinians in Gaza that the United States was prepared to address some of their long-term economic and political grievances and to acknowledge Mr. Netanyahu’s argument that a way needs to be found to demilitarize Gaza.
But Mr. Kerry’s decision to relegate such issues to a subsequent phase of the negotiations — after a cease-fire is established — also appeared to be an implicit recognition of the difficulties.
Hamas, the main militant group in Gaza, reiterated its rejection of such an approach on Wednesday night. Khaled Meshal, the group’s political leader, made his opposition clear in a speech broadcast from his home-in-exile in Doha, Qatar.
“What is needed now is the implementation of the resistance’s demands, then setting the zero-hour for truce,” Mr. Meshal said. “We will not accept any initiative that doesn’t lift the siege on our people and respect their sacrifices and championships.”
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