Uniformed police officers returned to the streets of Gaza on Monday with machine guns in tow as Hamas sought to reassert control over the battered coastal enclave, declaring that Israel’s 22-day air and land assault had done nothing to weaken the militant group’s authority here.
“Hamas emerged from this battle with its head held high,” said Hamad Ruqb, a Hamas official in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. “Every Israeli attack only increases our support.”
As Israeli tanks and soldiers continued their withdrawal, residents began to assess the damage. In addition to a death toll estimated at more than 1,300, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimated infrastructure and economic losses at almost $2 billion. The bureau estimated that 14 percent of all buildings in Gaza were destroyed.
From Kuwait, the Saudi Arabian monarchy vowed to spend $1 billion to help rebuild Gaza, but warned Israel that a long-standing Arab peace offer was imperiled.
“Israel must realize that the choice between peace and war will not always be open to it,” King Abdullah said at an Arab League economic forum, according to the Persian Gulf state’s official Kuwait News Agency. “The Arab peace initiative will not always remain on the table.”
In 2002, Saudi Arabia offered a peace package promising normalized diplomatic and economic relations with Israel in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza along the borders that existed before 1967.
As Gaza residents emerged from the rubble and buried their dead Monday, a representative of the military wing of Hamas said only 48 of its thousands of fighters were killed. Israel says 400 died.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni warned Hamas against firing rockets. “If Hamas fires one Kassam to the south or anywhere else in Israel, it will be struck again, and Hamas knows it,” she said on Israeli radio.
The fragile unilateral cease-fires held Monday.
Israeli officials maintain that many Palestinians blame Hamas for the deaths and injuries during the Israeli assault. The militant group had refused to renew a shaky six-month truce with Israel that expired Dec. 19 and then resumed launching dozens of rockets a day at southern Israeli cities.
Some Gazans expressed similar sentiments.