Palestinian militants have agreed to stop violence from this morning and Israel reciprocating with agreeing to withdraw the forces from Gaza.
JERUSALEM: In a major breakthrough, Palestinian militants have agreed to stop violence from this morning and Israel reciprocating with agreeing to withdraw the forces from Gaza, the Prime Minister's office said.
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas informed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert late Sunday that he had arrived at an agreement with all Palestinian factions to stop violence from Gaza, government spokesperson Miri Eisin said.
Abbas asked Israel to reciprocate by stopping military operations in Gaza and withdrawing its forces to which Olmert consented, Eisin said.
An aide to Abbas, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, said later in Gaza City that Palestinian armed factions had agreed to stop their military activities today and reinstate a truce agreed upon in Egypt in Feburary 2005.
"There is a signed agreement between the President and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and all the Palestinian factions to resort to the agreement of the factions in Cairo in 2005, including ceasing all the military activity from Gaza, starting from Sunday morning," Abu Rdeneh said.
"The Israeli prime minister has agreed, and it is going to start tomorrow morning," he said.
Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, a Hamas ally, yesterday said, "We have set O6OO local time (0930 IST) tomorrow morning to stop firing rockets toward Zionist towns in our occupied land in return for a mutual cessation of the aggression committed against our people."
"We give six months to open real political horizons... we agreed on the national accord to establish a Palestinian state, with the June 4, 1967 borders," Mujahed said.
Meanwhile, five Palestinian militants were killed in Israel Defence Forces operations in the Gaza Strip yesterday, as militants continued to fire Qassam rockets into Israel.
Two Hamas militants were killed late yesterday evening in an Israel Air Forces attack on their vehicle in Gaza.
They were identified as Walid Komboz and Khaled Abdullah.
Hospital sources in Gaza said that twenty one Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks during the last three days of their operations.
Israel had launched a massive offensive in Gaza on June 25 following the abduction of one of its soldiers by militant factions.
Nothing was mentioned about the soldier in the ceasefire agreement but it is being said that talks are going on under Egyptian mediation.
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