Refugee tide rising, Gaza aid groups say

GAZA CITY — Growing numbers of Palestinians were fleeing their homes for makeshift shelters in schools, office buildings and a park as the Israeli army continued on Monday to press its military campaign deeper into Gaza City.

According to the United Nations, about 30,000 people are living in schools it sponsors, and an estimated 60,000 have fled to the houses of relatives. The figures represent a small part of Gaza's 1.5 million population, but the numbers have doubled in the past four days, U.N. officials said, raising concerns about the humanitarian impact of a broader war.

"What began as very small, isolated numbers is now turning into a torrent," said Aidan O'Leary, deputy director for the U.N. agency that deals with Palestinian refugees.

Maj. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman, said units used leaflets to warn families to leave areas in which they planned to operate. Aid officials say that with Gaza's borders closed, choices for shelters in the 140-square-mile strip are slim and not completely safe. Last week, as many as 43 people were killed at a U.N. school by an Israeli mortar fired, the military said, in response to a Hamas attack. The Israeli military disputes the death toll.

Egypt continued to press for a cease-fire on Monday, the 18th day of Israel's military campaign in Gaza to stop Hamas rockets. Its state-owned Middle East News Agency quoted an unnamed Egyptian official as saying talks between the nation's intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, and Hamas envoys were "positive."

Special Mideast envoy Tony Blair, speaking from Cairo, Egypt, said the "elements of an agreement for an immediate cease-fire are there," The Associated Press reported, though a senior Israeli military official, Amos Gilad, postponed his trip to Egypt to discuss a possible truce. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were not yet public, said the delay was a matter of timing and not a breakdown in talks.

In a televised speech Monday night, a senior Hamas official, Ismail Haniya, expressed a willingness for a diplomatic solution but reiterated previous demands that any deal include the opening of Gaza's border crossings, which Israel and Egypt have kept mostly closed since Hamas violently pushed out its rival, Fatah, in 2007.

"We are not closed to this path," he said of diplomacy, speaking from hiding in Gaza.

He praised Hamas fighters as heroes who would be victorious.

Aid groups, meanwhile, spotlighted what they said was a growing number of refugees. When Israeli soldiers moved deeper into the Zeitun neighborhood Sunday night, Olfat Jaawanah decided she'd had enough. Shrapnel flew through a window, injuring her son, Ali, she said, and on Monday morning she gathered a few blankets and moved her nine children out of their large house.

The nearby U.N. school was full — its bare classrooms packed with families and its toilets fetid — so she brought her family instead to her husband's office, a Gaza City building belonging to an international organization.

"Explosions, rockets," she said, arranging her children's clothes. "We can't take it anymore."

According to O'Leary, about a third of the U.N.'s 91 schools are now full.

Movement is complicated by the confusion over when it is safe to leave.

But Majad Abdel Karim Abu Hajaj, a teacher at a U.N. school, said his mother and sister were killed as they walked holding a white flag. When they received a leaflet last weekend, they took it as a sign of safe passage. Their bodies remain where they fell, he said, because ambulances cannot get to the area.

Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, said she had six reports of families stuck in areas occupied by Israeli troops.

At times, the city took on a cinematic quality. A woman came with a pan and dough to al-Nasir hospital, asking for the use of their electricity so she could bake. A corpse was wheeled in a donkey cart where an ambulance was afraid to go.

Humanitarian shipments were moving on Monday, and Egypt, under pressure to do more for Palestinian victims of the conflict, agreed to allow in 38 Arab doctors and a group of European parliamentarians.

Palestinians interviewed in Gaza on Monday cited another reason for their flight: Israel soldiers, they allege, are firing rounds of a noxious substance that burns skin and makes it hard to breathe.

A resident of southwest Gaza City on Monday showed a reporter a piece of metal casing with the identifying number M825A1, which Marc Garlasco, a military analyst with Human Rights Watch, identified as white phosphorous, typically used for signaling, producing smoke screens and destroying enemy equipment.

Dallal would not say whether Israel was using white phosphorous but said: "The munitions we use are consistent with international law."

Luay Suboh, 10, from Beit Lahiya, lost his eyesight and the skin on his face Saturday when, his mother Siham said, a casing clung to him as he darted home from a shelter, where his family is staying, to pick up clothes.

The substance smelled like burned trash, said Jaawanah.

She said her feelings about Hamas have changed.

"Do you think I'm against them firing rockets now?" she asked, referring to Hamas. "No. I was against it before. Not anymore."