Israel has pulled its ground forces out of the Gaza Strip and started a 72-hour ceasefire with Hamas in the first step towards negotiations on a more enduring end to the month-old war.
Minutes before the Egypt-mediated truce began at 8:00am local time (3:00pm AEST), Hamas launched a salvo of rockets, calling them revenge for Israel’s “massacres”.
Israel’s anti-missile system shot down one rocket over Jerusalem, police said, while another hit a house in a town near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. There were no casualties.
The ceasefire comes as Palestinian foreign minister Riad al-Malki announced there was “clear evidence” that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, after meeting with prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
He said his administration was making efforts to have Palestine introduced as a member of the court, a legal step that would grant the ICC jurisdiction over alleged crimes in the territory.
Ahead of the truce, Israeli armour and infantry withdrew from the Gaza Strip, with a military spokesman saying their main goal of destroying cross-border infiltration tunnels had been completed.
“Mission accomplished,” the military tweeted.
Troops and tanks will be “redeployed in defensive positions outside the Gaza Strip and we will maintain those defensive positions,” spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said, reflecting Israeli readiness to resume fighting if attacked.
In Gaza, where some half-a-million people have been displaced by a month of fighting, some residents, carrying mattresses and with children in tow, left UN shelters to trek back to neighbourhoods where whole blocks have been destroyed by Israeli shelling and the smell of decomposing bodies fills the air.
Sitting on a pile of debris on the edge of the northern town of Beit Lahiya, Zuhair Hjaila, a 33-year-old father of four, said he had lost his house and his supermarket.
“This is complete destruction,” he said.
“I never thought I would come back to find an earthquake zone.”