Palestinian envoy to UN calls for mutual cease-fire in Gaza

The Palestinian observer to the United Nations on Monday called for a mutual cease-fire to end an Israel Defense Forces offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Riyad Mansour said the Palestinians were also willing to accept UN observers to monitor the cease-fire along the Gaza-Israel border.

He said UN ambassadors from Arab states held an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the offensive along the northern Gaza border. Israel says it is aimed at halting Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli communities near the coastal strip.

Mansour asked for an open meeting of the UN Security Council and said the ambassadors would prepare a draft resolution that would condemn the Israeli action and call for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of troops from Gaza.

He said Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas also sent a letter to the council president saying the escalation of violence in the past six days had made it difficult for the Palestinians to finalize plans to form a national unity government and make it possible to exchange prisoners with Israel.

"We are the ones who are suffering immensely," Mansour told a news conference. "In spite of that, we are the ones who are willing to honor and respect a mutual cease-fire."

Israel's deputy UN ambassador Daniel Carmon rejected Mansour's statement, saying the Palestinian government must act instead to halt rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.

"There would be no need for (Israeli) hostilities if there was not terrorism," he said in a telephone interview. "It came as a reaction in self-defense to hundreds and hundreds of rocket attacks from the Palestinian territories toward Israel."

The United States blocked an Arab-backed UN resolution several weeks later that would have demanded Israel halt the offensive, the first UN Security Council veto in nearly two years.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged Sunday to press ahead with the offensive to "considerably reduce" the ability of militants to fire rockets at Israel.