Live Blog: Gaza under attack

Members of a family in Khuza'a say an Israeli soldier shot their relative point blank as he waved a white flag, tried to negotiate exit of women and children from home

- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/please-dont-shoot-me-2045731313#sthash.Q8yNWdz7.7P0amn82.dpuf

Israel's negotiators have reportedly returned to Cairo to continue Egyptian-led truce talks on the conflict in Gaza, Haaretz has reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that the delegation would not return for talks until Palestinian rocketfire halted.

"Israel will not engage in negotiations under fire," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Four Gazans who were injured in Israeli attacks on the strip were airlifted to Turkey and more are expected to follow. "Our wounded from Gaza have started to come," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters at the airport in Ankara, where he greeted the Palestinians, three women and a youth who were then taken to hospital.

"In the first stage we plan to bring to Turkey, and treat, maybe 200 patients," Davutoglu said, adding that further patients would be brought by planes in groups of around 40 after agreeing the move in talks with Israel and Egypt.

Davutoglu told Reuters in an interview last Wednesday that Turkey was seeking to establish an air corridor to evacuate possibly thousands of injured Palestinians and Erdogan confirmed the move in his first speech after his victory in a presidential election. 

- A new 72-hour ceasefire brokered by Egypt between Palestinian resistance groups and Israel in the blockaded Gaza Strip seems to hold with no breaches reported from either side in the first hours of the truce that went into effect on Monday.

- Israeli warplanes continued to fly over the embattled enclave overnight, reports Anadolu Agency.

- A Palestinian man was killed in a standoff with Israeli forces in Nablus, West Bank, when Israeli forces arrived to arrest him, according to Haaretz.

- Hamas chief Khalid Mashaal emphasised in an interview in Doha on Sunday that any lasting truce with Israel must involve the complete lifting of the siege on Gaza, reports Maan News Agency.

- The Middle East Eye reported on Sunday that, Hamas has decided to demand that President Mahmoud Abbas sign the Rome Statute which will allow Palestine to join the International Criminal Court as a full member, even though the militant movement itself could be subject to prosecution. - See more at: http://middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-hamas-pushes-abbas-join-icc-316559675#sthash.QlIyMjVu.dpuf

- More than 1939 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza since July 7, while more than 10,000 others injured.

A letter sent to the Guardian protesting a wildly inflammatory advert which likens the Palestinian resistance in Gaza to child killers has attracted up to 80,000 signatures. The advert by the political activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was rejected by the Times of London.

Giving the traditional Angelus prayer in St Peter's Square at the Vatican, the head of the Roman Catholic Church renewed his call for prayer and assistance for those hit by the conflict in Iraq.

He discussed the fighting in Gaza, which he described as "a war that cuts down innocent victims and does nothing but worsen the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians".

The Guardian has provoked controversy by agreeing to run an ad featuring political activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel using religious imagery to call on governments to condemn the use of children as human shields by Hamas.

The ad has been criticised in many quarters, including by the pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada which described it as an "incitement to genocide."

The ad reads "Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now its Hamas' turn."

The ad has already run in a number of papers including the Washington Post and New York Times, but was rejected by the Times of London as “the opinion being expressed is too strong and too forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers.”

The Times of London is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also own the Wall Street Journal, which previously ran the ad.

The Palestinians are examining a proposal for a new 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza, a Hamas spokesman told AFP on Sunday.

"There is a proposal for another 72-hour truce (to allow) for the continuation of negotiations," Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP in Gaza, without saying when it would begin.

"This proposal is being studied," he said, indicating the Palestinian response would depend on "the seriousness of the Israeli position."

Associated Press earlier quoted an unnamed official saying the Palestinians had "accepted" the proposal.

The spokespeople spoke on condition of anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the negotiations.

Talks in Cairo between Israel and various Palestinian factions are in danger of breaking down as Hamas accuses Israel of not taking them seriously.

"There will be a meeting in order to decide if we are going to continue the talks or not," Hamas's deputy chairman Moussa Abu Marzouk told the Guardian, "because there is no seriousness from the Israeli side about the talks."

He said Hamas had not decided whether to continue attacks on Israel, in light of the failure of the talks, but emphasised that "all the options are available to the Palestinian people in order to them to gain their rights." He said: "If we don't have justice and rights, we will keep resisting our enemies until we get them … If they don't give us our rights today, we will continue the battle."

Haaretz:

Palestinian negotiators will remain in Cairo for an urgent meeting with the Arab League on Monday to discuss the Gaza crisis, Egypt's state MENA news agency said, despite Hamas' threats to leave if the Israeli delegation does not arrive by later Sunday.

Former British cabinet minister Baroness Warsi, who resigned over the British government's inaction over the Israeli attack on Gaza, has been interviewed in the Independent over her reasons for leaving:

"One of the arguments I've heard from people is: 'Why don't you criticise Assad?' Well, we did. 'Why don't you criticise Isis?' Well we did. 'Why don't you criticise Iran?' We did. 'Why don't you criticise Putin?' We did. 'Why don't you criticise Israel?' Well, we didn't. That's the difference. It is about an inconsistent approach to our foreign policy. It is an inconsistency about our application of our values.

Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn, writing in the Independent, has critiqued Israel's failure to make any concrete gains from the current war in Gaza:

"Every opponent of Israel, however puny, is treated by Israeli governments and much of the Israeli media as representing an existential threat. Any retaliatory violence is therefore justified, whether the targets are Palestinians, Lebanese or the 10 Turks killed on board the flotilla of boats trying to bring aid to Gaza in 2010. This sense of permanent persecution, born of pogroms and the Holocaust, is understandable but makes Israelis peculiarly vulnerable to demagogues manipulating their sense of threat. Israeli spokesmen have triumphantly pointed to polls showing that 90 per cent of Israelis currently support Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, but this lack of contrary opinion about a venture so unlikely to do Israel much good is, in reality, a sign of weakness in a nation."