After a brief pause,Israel continues strikes on Gaza

Israel pressed on with its 12-day bombardment of the Gaza Strip...

Israel pressed on with its 12-day bombardment of the Gaza Strip on Wednesday,despite a brief suspension of fighting to permit humanitarian aid to reach the beleaguered population and a French assertion that a ceasefire proposal had been accepted by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The afternoon lull in the fighting suggested Israel might be responding,if only tentatively,to diplomatic pressure,a day after Israeli mortar shells killed as many as 40 Palestinians,among them women and children,outside a UN school in Gaza. Israel also said it welcomed the French-Egypt cease-fire initiative but said talks were continuing.

Israel said the three-hour lull would be repeated everyday to allow people to seek medical help,buy food and receive humanitarian supplies.

It was not immediately clear whether the militant Hamas movement had also agreed to the plan,although senior Hamas officials were quoted as saying that it would not fire any rockets while Israel suspended its bombing.

While the guns fell silent for several hours on Wednesday,news reports from the Israel-Gaza border area said a string of explosions was soon heard after Wednesdays three-hour lull ended.

In Paris,President Nicolas Sarkozy,who toured the region earlier this week in a diplomatic drive for a ceasefire,issued a statement welcoming what he called the acceptance by Israel and the Palestinian Authority of what he called a French-Egyptian plan put forward Tuesday evening by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

But the status of the proposal was far from clear and some Palestinians remained skeptical. Hanan Ashrawi,a Palestinian legislator,said that the plan fell short of a ceasefire. Israel is still buying time to create facts on the ground, she said. Details of the French-Egyptian plan were not immediately made public.

Story continues below this ad

Mark Regev,the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,said: We welcome the French-Egyptian initiative. We want to see it succeed.

A Hamas official in the Gaza Strip was quoted as saying that the Egyptian proposal was still under discussion, suggesting that a ceasefire was further away than the French statement seemed to imply.