Hamas calls on West to end boycott, as Gaza truce takes hold

GAZA CITY - A fragile truce took hold in the Gaza Strip Thursday, ending, for the time being at least, months of deadly violence and prompting Hamas to call for an end to the Western boycott against it.
The truce - the result of months of indirect, Egyptian-led negotiations between Israel and the radical Islamic movement ruling Gaza - took effect at 6 am (0300 GMT) Thursday morning.
But flexing their muscles in the hours before the deadline, Palestinian militants launched 32 rockets and more than 10 mortar shells at southern Israel, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
Israel launched an airstrike at one group of the rocket launchers in the central Gaza Strip before dawn Thursday, killing a Hamas militant just one hour and a half before the truce began.
After the truce took effect, an Israeli naval vessel also fired warning shots Wednesday morning at Palestinian fishing boats, which the military said had drifted into a 'closed security zone' on the maritime border between the northern Gaza Strip and Israel.
Despite the last-minute violence, the truce took precarious hold and no more incidents were reported during its first hours Wednesday.
Although Israel negotiated the truce with Hamas indirectly, internal Israeli critics have charged the deal grants legitimacy to the radical Islamic movement and recognition of it as the de-facto ruler of the Strip.
Hamas too called on Western leaders 'to change their attitude' toward the movement after it committed to the truce.
'We call on the international community to reconsider its decision to impose an embargo on the movement,' Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told reporters in Gaza City.
But European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, although he welcomed the truce, said it was too early to say whether the EU could begin holding direct talks with Hamas, which the bloc considers a terrorist organization.
The truce, he nevertheless said in Brussels, could create 'a dynamic that will allow political dialogue to continue.'
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Hamas was still a 'terrorist organization,' with which Israel did not and would not hold direct negotiations.
'Hamas and the other terrorist organizations have not changed and have not become patrons of peace. These are contemptible and bloodthirsty terrorists,' Olmert told a conference near Tel Aviv.
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald from Jerusalem published Thursday, he also warned that the truce was Hamas' last chance to avoid a massive military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Olmert was scheduled to travel to Egypt Tuesday, for talks with Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak on the truce brokered by Cairo.
The first stage of the three-phase, six-month truce entails a mutual end of hostilities.
According to Hamas officials, Israel is to lift severe restrictions on the entry of fuel into the Strip already in the first hours of the truce.
As of Sunday, it is to ease restrictions on the entry of other goods.
One week after, Cairo is to invite Hamas, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and European Union representatives for talks on a mechanism to open the Rafah border crossing between southern Gaza and Egypt.
Israel has made the opening of Rafah conditional on the freedom of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, held captive in Gaza by Hamas for the past two years.
Intense, renewed negotiations on his release in exchange for Palestinian militants imprisoned in Israel are to begin simultaneously to the talks on Rafah, with the Israeli official charged with negotiating the prisoners swap, Ofer Dekel, also due to travel to Egypt next week.
Shalit's parents have expressed outrage over the truce, saying they were promised by Olmert that Israel would not agree to a deal without securing guarantees for Shalit's release. Their lawyers sent a protest letter to the Israeli premier, threatening to petition to Israel's supreme court against the agreement.
Western countries imposed a boycott on Hamas after it won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, but refused calls to renounce violence, honour past interim agreements calling for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and change its charter to accept Israel's right to exist.
Europe and the United States have instead dealt only with Abbas of the rival Fatah party, who was elected in separate presidential elections a year earlier on a platform that did support a two-state solution.
After a short-lived unity government with Fatah, Hamas seized sole control of the Gaza Strip one year ago, by ousting security forces loyal to Abbas and Fatah.
Since the Gaza take-over, militants have launched more than 4,000 rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel, killing four Israelis. Israel's retaliatory strikes against militants in the densely- populated Strip have killed more than 360 Palestinians.