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UNITED NATIONS: Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas Tuesday pressed the UN Security Council to call for a halt to Israeli "aggression" and to end the "unjust siege" of the Gaza Strip.
"I call on the Council to take the first necessary step to save my people in Gaza," he told the 15-member body.
"A resolution calling for an immediate full cessation of Israeli aggression," Abbas said on the 11th day of an Israeli military onslaught that has claimed 660 Palestinian lives in Gaza.
In his address, Abbas also called for an end to the "unjust siege suffocating Gaza, the reopening of all crossing points, particularly between Israel and Gaza and between Gaza and Egypt."
"Put an end to the massacre of my people," he told the council. "Let my people live and let my people be free."
His appeal came during a ministerial debate of the Security Council on Israel's bloody offensive, including strikes Tuesday on three UN-run schools that claimed dozens of lives, in response to rocket firing by Palestinian militants.
But the council meeting was overshadowed by news of an apparent breakthrough in the mediation undertaken by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the Middle East.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said after talks with Sarkozy in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that he invited Israel and the Palestinians for an urgent meeting to discuss security on the Egypt-Gaza border.
Egypt "invites the Israelis and Palestinians for an urgent meeting to reach arrangements and guarantees that would not allow the repeat of the current escalation," Mubarak said.
Such guarantees would include "securing the borders and... opening of the border crossings and lifting the siege," he said.
But Israel's UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev blamed the Palestinian movement Hamas for the violence, restating that her country was merely exercising its right of self-defence.
"This is not about a ceasefire with terrorism or a mutual cessation of hostilities. It is about ensuring the end of terrorism from Gaza, and the end of smuggling weapons into Gaza," she added.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose country is Israel's main ally, insisted that a ceasefire that did not put an end to militant rocket firing into Israel "is unacceptable and would not last."
Rice said any ceasefire deal must also include an end to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza and the reopening of border crossings 'so that the Palestinians can benefit from humanitarian goods and basic supplies."
France, in its capacity as president of the 15-member council this month, had been working with Arab states to try to draw up a draft UN resolution that would urge an immediate end to the Israeli military offensive in Gaza as well as to rocket fire into Israel by Gaza-based militants.
The proposed text would also urge the lifting of the Israeli siege of Gaza to allow humanitarian access to the beleaguered Palestinian population and an international mechanism to monitor the truce, protect Palestinian civilians and put an end to arms smuggling into Gaza from Egypt.
But in his address to the council, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the focus should now be on the Sarkozy mediation which led to Mubarak's call for talks involving Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian factions.
"The Security Council must back and encourage these promising efforts," he said. "All regional states must support this movement and seek to foster moderation and restraint."
His British counterpart David Miliband offered support, urging the Council "to be clear in our principles and practical in our conclusions to reinforce these efforts."
Speaking from Sharm el-Sheikh, Sarkozy warned after conferring with Mubarak Tuesday that a Security Council resolution on Gaza would "complicate" the task of achieving peace.
Israel meanwhile said it would open a humanitarian corridor into Gaza to prevent a humanitarian crisis.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he was "deeply dismayed" by the Israeli strikes on three UN-run schools which killed at least 48 people in Gaza and called them "totally unacceptable."
But the Israeli military said that Hamas "terror operatives" were among the dozens of dead and that mortar fire had come from the building.
- AFP/yb
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