Hamas rejects 4-hour cease-fire extension in Gaza
Yousef Al-Helou and Janelle Dumalaon, Special for USA TODAY 3:09 p.m. EDT July 26, 2014
GAZA CITY — Hamas rejected Israel's four-hour extension of a humanitarian cease-fire Saturday as the Palestinian death toll in the conflict rose to more than 1,000.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri sent a text message to reporters Saturday, saying: "No agreement to extending the calm for an additional four hours." A short time afterward, the Israeli military said three rockets were fired from Gaza.
The cease-fire rejection came after the Israeli Cabinet agreed to extend the 12-hour truce until midnight Saturday, and Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli Cabinet minister, said a further extension would be considered.
Earlier Saturday, the Israeli military had warned that it "shall respond if terrorists choose to exploit" the lull to attack Israeli troops "or fire at Israeli civilians." It also said that operations to locate and neutralize tunnels would continue.
Meanwhile, at least 100 bodies were recovered Saturday, Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra said, as Palestinians used the cease-fire to move medical supplies and tend to the dead and injured in the Gaza Strip.
As the initial lull in hostilities began at 8 a.m. Saturday, Gazans poured onto the streets to find food supplies, look for missing family members or return to homes they left for shelters. The nearly three weeks of fighting has left swaths of rubble, destroyed roads and damaged power infrastructure in residential neighborhoods across the strip.
More than 1,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have been killed since the conflict began on July 8. Another 6,000 have been wounded. In Israel, 43 have died, including 40 soldiers, two civilians and a Thai worker.
Imad Nasrallah, 38, said he and others have made it a point not to forget the living.
"With my brothers and neighbors, we volunteer and go help others, in case their homes were targeted," Nasrallah said. "We transfer the wounded to hospitals or go carry the martyrs and bury them."
A Palestinian man cries at the site of his house, which was destroyed by shelling, in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, on July 26, 2014. (Photo: Oliver Weiken, European Pressphoto Agency) Fullscreen
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Saturday's temporary truce was the second and the longest since the conflict began on July 8. A humanitarian cease-fire on July 17 was quickly overlooked as rocket fire resumed as soon as the set five hours expired.
In Paris on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with European foreign ministers to find ways to build off Saturday's lull.
On Friday, Israel rejected a U.S.-backed proposal for a weeklong truce because it would require its forces to interrupt its operation to destroy Hamas tunnels. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon told troops Friday that Israel may significantly widen the Gaza ground operation.
A truce proposed by Egypt last week was rejected by Hamas because the group said it wasn't consulted. Hamas says any peace deal must include the lifting of a blockade against Gaza.
In the northern town of Beit Hanoun, residents — many of whom had fled days earlier — encountered widespread destruction Saturday.
"Nothing is left. Everything I have is gone," said Siham Kafarneh, 37, weeping as she talked about the destroyed home she had spent 10 years saving up for and moved into just two months ago.
The continued hostilities have meant nowhere is safe for Nasrallah and his family as shelters no longer offer the promise of security, he said.
"It's not safe to go out but there is no guarantee our homes are safe," said Nasrallah. "Many houses were hit by Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes while people were inside.
The reality of the saga of the Knights Templar is almost as amazing as the myths that embellish it. On Thursday the Vatican plans to add another colorful chapter when it publishes a long-misplaced, 699-year-old papal report on the medieval holy warriors. Vatican publisher Scrinium will offer 799 copies (the 800th will go to the Pope), at $8,375 apiece, of a 1308 parchment titled Processus Contra Templarios(Trial Against the Templars), which chronicles the order's sordid endgame: the accusations of heresy, the Templars' defense, and Pope Clement V's absolution of the order, before he did an about-face and eliminated it.
Interest in the group extends far beyond the ranks of Church historians, of course. The tale of the Templars remains a gaudy thread woven through the religion, politics and literature of Western civilization, with a recent boost from the embellishments of Dan Brown, who cast the Knights as a key part of the conspiracy to conceal Church secrets in his best-seller The Da Vinci Code.
Almost from their founding, the Templars have been rumored
a.) to still exist
b.) to be impossibly rich, and
c.) to guard the Holy Grail (the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper) and other Christian relics.
Most of these stories are probably baseless, although for 150 years in the high Middle Ages, their order was incontestably one of the most powerful and creative military and economic forces in the world.
a.) to still exist
b.) to be impossibly rich, and
c.) to guard the Holy Grail (the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper) and other Christian relics.
Most of these stories are probably baseless, although for 150 years in the high Middle Ages, their order was incontestably one of the most powerful and creative military and economic forces in the world.
The Templars were a creature of the Crusades, when various Christian forces sailed from Europe to fight the resident Muslims for control of the biblical Holy Land. After the first Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1096, European pilgrims began streaming into the city, and 23 years later, two veterans of the Crusade founded an order of monastic knights to protect the travelers. They were allotted a headquarters in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, viewed by Jews and many Christians as the site of the Temple of Solomon — hence the new group's name. Initially modest (its coat of arms was two knights on one horse because that was all they could afford), its fortunes skyrocketed when the Vatican extended it extraordinary privileges, exempting it from local laws, taxes and any authority but the Pope's. Suddenly it was bestowed with spectacular gifts of money and land and inundated by volunteers from some of Europe's most noble families. Well-equipped and trained Templar knights became one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Holy Land — 500 Templar knights are said to have played a major role in defeating a Muslim force of 26,000 in 1177's Battle of Montgisard.
Their non-military exploits were more ambitious still. For the convenience of the monied pilgrims they chaperoned through hostile turf, the Templars developed a system whereby they left their wealth and lands at the disposal of a Templar institution at home, in exchange for a coded invoice that was then redeemed at the group's headquarters in Jerusalem. Researchers believe the Templars kept any revenues generated by the estates, effectively accruing interest — a practice otherwise forbidden as usury by the Church at the time. The journalAmerican Banker wrote in 1990 that "a good case can be made for crediting [the Templars] with the birth of deposit banking, of checking, and of modern credit practices." It certainly made them some of Europe's richest and most powerful financiers. The Templars have been described as taking crown jewels and indeed entire kingdoms as mortgage for loans, and they maintained major branches in France, Portugal, England, Aragon, Hungary and various Mid-Eastern capitals. The group controlled as many as 9,000 estates, and left behind hundreds of buildings great and small. (The London subway stop Temple is named after one of them.)
But many of the myths attending the secretive order have less to do with their financial empire than with their most famous piece of real estate. Who knew what wonders they might have unearthed digging beneath the Mosque to the alleged Temple of Solomon, not far from where Christ was crucified? They claimed to own a piece of the True Cross; they may very well have possessed the Shroud of Turin, since it was a Templar descendant's family that first made it public; and unsubstantiated rumor has put them in possession of both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. The latter claim provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration for fabulists from medieval romance peddlers to Dan Brown.
Unless you take The Da Vinci Code as a work of history, however, the glory didn't last. The order lost its purpose and credibility when the Muslim warrior Saladin drove the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187, setting the Templars on a path of retreat that saw them give up their last Mid-Eastern foothold, in what is now Syria, in 1303. From there, the decline was precipitous: The Templars failed in an effort to take control of Cyprus, and then, in 1307, Philip IV of France found it more convenient to order the arrest and torture of the Templars to extract confessions of heresy than to repay his heavy debts to the order. This led to the trial under Pope Clement, who was based in Avignon and under the protection of Philip.
The document the Vatican will release Thursday, misplaced in its archives until 2001, is reportedly the official transcript of that trial and Clement's 1308 verdict, which found the Templars to be immoral but not heretical. The Pope allegedly intended to reform them. But under continued pressure from his French protector, Clement instead disbanded them in 1312 and gave most of their riches to a rival military order.
The notion of that much money, power and influence vanishing at a Papal penstroke appears to have been too much for the mythic sensibility of the West, which wanted to believe that the Templars must somehow have survived, adapted, or been subsumed into another, even more secretive trans-national group. Over the centuries, the allegedly still-extant order has been portrayed as malevolent, benign, heroic and occult. Organizations all over the world, without any direct connection, have appropriated its name. (The Freemasons reportedly have an "Order of the Knights of Templar," thus consummating a kind of conspiracy theorist's dream marriage.) Such homages should not obscure the fact that however much power they enjoy in the realm of fiction and fantasy, it almost certainly does not equal that which they once actually possessed — and then abruptly lost.
