U.S. Senator John Kerry visits Gaza

The visit "does not indicate any shift whatsoever with respect to Hamas," said Kerry, who heads the Senates powerful foreign relations committee.Â

 

His first stop in the impoverished Palestinian enclave was the American school that was left in ruins by the deadly 22-day Israeli offensive that ended on January 18. Â

 

Talking to a Palestinian lawyer amid the dust and rubble, Kerry came to the defense of Israel for responding to almost daily rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups.

 

"Your political leadership needs to understand that any nation that has rockets coming into it over many years, threatening its citizens, is going to respond," Kerry told Shar Habeel al-Zaim.

 

Kerry, who crossed from Israel into the Palestinian enclave aboard a U.N. vehicle, briefly toured Izzbet Abed Rabbo, a northern Gaza community ravaged by the Israeli offensive.

 

His visit coincided with a similar trip by Democratic U.S. representatives Brian Baird and Keith Ellison.

 

He was expected to hold talks with U.N. officials involved in efforts to help Gaza recover from the military offensive that came on the heels of 18 months of a crippling blockade.

 

Travelling to Gaza indicates "our effort to listen and to learn," the 2004 presidential candidate said earlier in Sderot, an Israeli city just outside Gaza that has been the main target of Palestinian rocket attacks in recent years.

 

The congressmen were not scheduled to meet any Hamas officials during their visits, the first such trips since the Islamists seized control of Gaza Strip in June

2007.

 

The United States, in common with the European Union, blacklists Hamas as a terror group.

 

"There is nothing in a visit that changes anything" said Kerry, who was scheduled to travel on to Syria on Saturday as part of his tour of the region.

 

"What has to change is behavior. What has to change obviously is Hamas’s consistent resort to instruments of terror," he said in Sderot, where he and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni inspected rockets fired by Gaza militants that are exhibited in the town’s police station.

 

"We feel very deeply that no one should have to live under this threat," he said.

 

"The politics of the Obama administration and this Democratic Congress remain the same with respect to Hamas," said Kerry.

 

The congressmen’s visits came against the backdrop of continued violence in and around the besieged territory despite Egypt’s efforts to broker a lasting ceasefire following the Israeli military offensive that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians.

 

Palestinian militants fired rockets and mortars at southern Israel on Thursday, the Israeli army said just hours after troops were reportedly involved in a firefight when they briefly entered Gaza.

 

Two rockets and two mortar rounds were fired from the Gaza Strip causing no casualties or damage, a military spokesman said.

 

The Israeli military responded with an air raid on smuggling tunnels on Gazas border with Egypt. Witnesses said there were no casualties.

 

In another development, a Palestinian who approached the border fence was lightly wounded by Israeli gunshots, witnesses said.

 

The armored vehicles entered the Gaza capital after anti-tank rockets were fired at them, witnesses said.

 

Cairo’s efforts to broker a lasting truce hit a snag on Wednesday when Israel’s security cabinet voted to make a truce conditional on the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier seized by Gaza militants in a deadly cross-border raid in June 2006.
Hamas insists that Shalit’s release be negotiated separately as part of a prisoner exchange involving hundreds of Palestinians currently held in Israeli jails.

 

Hamas has said any truce must include the opening of Gaza’s border crossings, which Israel has closed to all but humanitarian aid since the Islamist movement seized control of the territory.

 

Egypt has been acting as a go-between in efforts to consolidate the separate ceasefires that ended Israel’s 22-day Gaza offensive on January 18. The ceasefires have been rattled by Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli military raids.