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Kerry, on Mideast trip, handed Hamas letter for Obama
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Kerry, on Mideast trip, handed Hamas letter for Obama
AFP - Saturday, February 21
JERUSALEM (AFP) - - US Senator John Kerry was meeting Israeli and Palestinian officials on Friday after a trip to war-ravaged Gaza, where he was given a letter to President Barack Obama from Hamas, considered a terror group by Washington.
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The chairman of the powerful Senate foreign relations committee was to hold talks with Israeli President Shimon Peres and then meet the Palestinians before flying to Syria on Saturday.
The president's office said Peres and Kerry would discuss "the regional reality in the wake of the war in Gaza" among other topics.
Kerry, who lost the 2004 presidential election to George W. Bush, saw for himself on Thursday the devastation wrought by Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza, which targetted Hamas, the Islamist movement that seized the Palestinian enclave in June 2007.
During talks with relief officials at the main UN compound in Gaza City, he was handed a letter from Hamas, addressed to Obama.
"A letter addressed to Obama was left at the gate of our offices in Gaza; it is believed to be from Hamas," said Christopher Gunness of UNRWA, the agency for Palestinian refugees.
Asked about the contents of the letter, Gunness said: "We are very polite at UNRWA, we don't open other people's mail."
Kerry did not meet any Hamas representative and stressed that his trip to the impoverished territory, which no US official had visited for years, did not indicate a shift of policy towards Hamas.
The United States, the European Union and Israel list Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
Kerry defended Israel for responding to almost daily rocket attacks by Hamas and other 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 a Palestinian lawyer amid the rubble of the American International School destroyed in the war that ended on January 18.
At the same time, Democratic congressmen Brian Baird from Washington state and Keith Ellison from Minnesota expressed dismay at the plight of the overpopulated coastal strip, which they visited at the same time as Kerry.
"The amount of physical destruction and the depth of human suffering here is staggering," Baird said in a statement issued jointly with Ellison during their Gaza trip.
Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, harshly criticised restrictions on the delivery of desperately needed goods into Gaza, which has been under a crippling Israeli blockade imposed after the 2007 Hamas takeover.
"People, innocent children, women and non-combatants, are going without water, food and sanitation, while the things they so desperately need are sitting in trucks at the border, being denied permission to go in," he said.
On Friday, Baird and Ellison planned to tour Sderot, an Israeli city frequently targeted by Palestinian rockets, which Kerry had visited with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni just before he went to neighbouring Gaza.
On Thursday evening, Kerry met Israel's armed forces chief of staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi.
Ashkenazi briefed Kerry "on the details of operation 'Cast Lead' and its achievements," the army said in reference to the Gaza war, which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis also died.
"The chief of staff presented to Senator Kerry the current strategic challenges faced by the state of Israel including the Iranian threat, the northern front and the Islamic terror effort in the Judea and Samaria region (West Bank) and the Gaza Strip," an army statement said.
Ashkenazi also "expressed his appreciation for the support shown by the United States administration to Israel, and for the ongoing cooperation between the two countries in the security and other fields," it said.
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Enlarge Photo
US Senator John Kerry (right) points to the remains of rockets launched from the nearby Gaza Strip during a visit with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to a police station in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. Kerry was meeting Israeli and Palestinian officials Friday after a trip to war-ravaged Gaza, where he was given a letter to President Barack Obama from Hamas.
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