Hamas ready for truce amid Gaza rockets crisis
Militants make truce gesture with Israel after several days of strikes and counter-attacks
Palestinian militants say they are ready for a truce with Israel to defuse a growing crisis after days of rocket strikes from the Gaza Strip.
As the conflict moved into a fifth day, the Israeli army said its aircraft struck Gaza three times early yesterday, hitting a weapons storage facility and two rocket launching sites used by militants. No casualties were reported in the strikes.
There was no immediate response from Israel to the suggestions of a truce, and it has warned it was ready to increase its air strikes and shelling if the rockets did not stop.
Leaders of Hamas, the faction that controls Gaza, met Islamic Jihad and other groups on Monday night and said they would respond according to the way Israel acted, which was an approach used in previous flare-ups to offer a ceasefire.
"If [Israel] is interested in calm they should stop the aggression," Sami Abu Zuhri, of Hamas, said.
The Palestinian people were acting in self-defence, he said.
"The ball is in Israel's court. The resistance factions will observe Israel's behaviour on the ground and will act accordingly," Khaled al-Batsh, of the Islamic Jihad group, said.