As Gazans and Israelis Briefly Take Stock, a Longer Cease

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip - Families across the Gaza Strip emerged from shelters and returned to their homes during a 12-hour cease-fire on Saturday to survey the damage to their neighborhoods, collect belongings and help dig bodies from the rubble.

For Akram Qassim, 53, all that remained of the three- story house he had shared with his two brothers and their families was a huge smoking crater strewn with rubble and twisted metal from an Israeli airstrike.

'I expected that maybe a shell had hit it and caused some damage,' Mr. Qassim said. 'But this is an earthquake.'

In southern Israel, a rocket landed in an open field just as the cease-fire was starting at 8 a.m. The police asked residents to remain off main roads being used to move military equipment around staging areas near Gaza. But residents who have spent much of the last weeks inside bomb shelters ventured cautiously outside, according to Israeli news reports, visiting soldiers in hospitals and helping farmers pick peppers from unprotected fields.

Israel has said its Gaza offensive is necessary to halt rocket fire by Palestinian militants on its cities and towns and to destroy an extensive tunnel network built by Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza. Hamas fighters use the tunnels to sneak fighters and supplies into Israel.

Palestinians see the war as a new case of Israeli aggression and feel that Israel has done little to protect civilians or their property, but Hamas is known to place weapons and fighters in residential neighborhoods and other places where civilians gather, including mosques.

Four houses close to Mr. Qassim's had also been reduced to piles of rubble; power lines that had been blown from their poles snaked across streets; and the air smelled of a dead horse lying in an empty lot.

'Are all these houses tunnels?' Mr. Qassim asked. 'Is that dead horse a tunnel?'

Gaza's health ministry said on Saturday that the total Palestinian death toll had exceeded 900, with at least 35 people killed in the 12 hours before the cease-fire began. The majority of Palestinians killed have been civilians.

It also said that the bodies of 20 people killed by Israeli tank fire had been recovered from a single home in central Gaza, at least 18 of them from one family. They had been trapped in their home by shelling since Thursday, the ministry said.

Israel said on Saturday that two of its soldiers were killed overnight, bringing the total since the ground invasion began to 37. Three civilians have also been killed by militant fire into Israel.

Israel's security forces were bracing for more clashes in the West Bank, where two Palestinians were killed Saturday morning, for a total of nine since large demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza began Thursday night.

Secretary of State John Kerry was in Paris Saturday to continue the diplomatic push for a longer-term cease-fire. Saturday's lull was declared for humanitarian purposes and was to last from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said troops would remain in place across the Gaza Strip and continue to search for underground tunnels during the pause. But he said, they would, not push forward or engage with militants, and would 'enable the humanitarian activities to take place.'

Israeli authorities said they were coordinating with international organizations to evacuate wounded and Palestinians, distribute food and repair utilities broken in battle.

By Saturday morning, Israeli forces had also found 31 tunnels and destroyed 15, Colonel Lerner said.

'They're continuing to operate against the tunnels,' he said. 'There's a lot of activity that needs to be done in order to destroy them, but other than that, we're holding our fire.'

News of the pause spread through Gaza Saturday morning on the radio and through phone calls, text messages and word of mouth.

Cars, horse carts and people on foot crowded the main road to this hard-hit town in northern Gaza. Many spoke on cellphones with relatives elsewhere, sometimes breaking down or wailing when they received reports of their destroyed homes.

At one point, two men in black face masks and carrying assault rifles came walking from the opposite direction, suggesting that militants were using the pause to change positions.

Realizing that the pause was only temporary, many families collected a few items from home to ease their continued displacement. Men strapped mattresses to the tops of cars and packed pillows and bottles of cooking gas in their trunks. One man salvaged a flat screen TV. A woman carried a garbage bag full of blankets and canned beans on her head.

'Bring a stretcher! Bring a stretcher!' yelled a man working with a group of medics and a bulldozer to remove bodies from a home that had been flattened in a recent airstrike.

'We have pulled out six so far and there are three left,' said Mohammed Nasser, who had relatives among the dead.

As the bulldozer dug, one of the dead was found with a Kalashnikov rifle at his side, suggesting that he - and perhaps the others - were militants. Cries of 'God is great!' erupted from the crowd as the body was carried to an ambulance.