Egyptian, Israeli and Hamas officials will meet next Monday in Cairo to discuss the aftermath of the ceasefire agreement, Ma’an reported.
The Office of Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said he was informed by the director of Egyptian intelligence that Israel agreed to allow Gaza fishermen to go six nautical miles off the coast of Gaza instead of three, which has been the limit under Israel’s siege.
“Israel has allowed Palestinian fishermen to fish in Gaza’s waters at a distance of six miles, up from three miles,” Haniyeh’s office said.
Israeli diplomatic sources confirmed that, subject to the understandings reached with Hamas in the ceasefire memoranda, Israel began today, Saturday, to provide relief to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip, and the first such relief came in the form of aiding the Gazan fishing industry by doubling the permitted fishing territory from three to six miles.
In practice this will mean that Israeli naval forces will not be challenging Gazan boats. And Hamas’s deputy politburo chief Mousa Abu Marzook already told AP that Hamas won’t stop making weapons in Gaza or smuggling them in from the outside.
“These weapons protected us and there is no way to stop obtaining and manufacturing them,” he said.
This was to be expected, since the main lesson Israel taught the Arabs last wee was that the only way to get results from it is by killing its innocent civilians.
Israel’s contribution to the Hamas war effort will be the further easing of limits and controls over the Gaza crossings, both into Israel and Egypt.
And, according to Ynet, Gaza residents said on Saturday they are now able to enter an Israeli-enforced buffer zone on the Gaza side of the border with Israel without fear of being fired on. A few years ago, the IDF declared a 300-meter-wide zone closed to Arab movement, in order to prevent terrorists from entering Israel.
But on Saturday, farmer Nidal Abu Dakka said soldiers stood by and watched as he and others moved close to the fence.
What a relief.