By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israel plans to halt its Gaza offensive without any agreement with Hamas, a senior Israeli official said on Saturday. Hamas vowed to fight on.
"The goal is to announce, subject to cabinet approval, a suspension of military activities because we believe our goals have been attained," said the official, asking not to be named.
The security cabinet is due to meet in the evening and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will address the nation after that.
"There is no agreement with Hamas, and it is clear that if Hamas fires against Israeli soldiers or if rocket fire into Israel continues, Israel will reserve the right to act," the official said.
A Hamas official in Beirut said earlier that the militants would fight on until Israel met their demands, mainly for an end to a crippling Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military kept up attacks on the enclave overnight and tank fire killed two small boys sheltering at a United Nations school, a U.N. official said.
"These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead," John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told Reuters after the school was hit.
The Israeli army was checking the report.
Another Israeli official said he expected the cabinet to declare a unilateral cease-fire and reach an agreement with Egypt on increased security along the Gaza-Egyptian border.
Under that agreement, he said, the Rafah border crossing would open in line with a 2005 agreement with the Palestinian Authority, which calls for President Mahmoud Abbas's forces to be in control and for Europeans to monitor traffic.
Gaza's border crossings with Israel were likely to be open initially only for humanitarian supplies, with a more permanent solution linked to progress over negotiations on Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held in Gaza by Hamas, the official said.
CAIRO TALKS
Hamas negotiators were due to meet Egyptian officials in Cairo to discuss Israel's response to truce terms offered by the Islamist movement, which controls the Gaza Strip.
"Either we hear what we have demanded or the result will be the continuation of confrontation on the ground," Osama Hamdan, Hamas's representative in Lebanon, declared in Beirut.
Egypt has been trying to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas as both sides refuse to deal directly with each other.
Hamas has offered a one-year, renewable truce on condition that all Israeli forces leave Gaza within a week and that all the border crossings with Israel and Egypt are opened.
Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, an Israeli-led blockade has closed the to everything except aid.
Israel appears keen to halt the Gaza offensive before Barack Obama is sworn in as U.S. president on Tuesday, to avoid clouding a historic day for its main ally. Israelis mostly back the war, but much of the world wants the bloodshed to stop.
At least 1,201 Palestinians have been killed, including 410 children, and 5,300 have been wounded, among them 1,630 children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.
Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by rockets fired from Gaza, have been killed since Israel launched an air attack on December 27.
Ging, the UNRWA chief, said Israeli tank fire killed the two brothers, aged 5 and 7, as they were sheltering at an UNRWA school in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. Their mother, who was among 14 wounded, had her legs blown off.
WAR CRIME?
"The question now being asked is: Is this and the killing of all other innocent civilians in Gaza a war crime?" Ging said.
About 45,000 Gazans fleeing battle zones are sheltering in U.N.-run schools in the enclave. On January 6 Israeli shelling killed 42 people who had taken refuge at a U.N. school. An UNRWA compound was hit twice on Thursday and three staff were wounded.
Many Gazans are desperate for an end to the fighting.
"We do not care how, we want a cease-fire. We want to go back to our homes. Our children need to go back to sleep in their beds," said Ali Hassan, 34, a father of five, who fled 15 days ago from north Gaza to stay with a brother in the city centre.
The Israeli army said it had attacked 50 targets overnight, including 16 tunnels, two mosques from which gunmen had fired on troops, three bunkers, eight rocket-launching pads and six mined areas including a booby-trapped building.
Hamas rocket fire has dwindled but not ceased. Seven rockets landed in Israel on Saturday, causing no casualties, the army said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is visiting the region, again called for an end to the conflict.
"We must remember that there is no military solution to the challenges facing this region," he told the Lebanese parliament.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, hoping to succeed Olmert when Israel votes on February 10, said on Friday the war need not end "in agreement with Hamas, but rather in arrangements against Hamas."
She was in Washington sealing a pact for U.S. help to ensure Hamas no longer smuggles arms to Gaza via Egypt.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said on Saturday his country was not committed to the U.S.-Israeli pact. "We have no commitment towards this memo whatsoever," he told reporters.
(Writing by Alistair Lyon; Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem, Alaa Shahine in Cairo, and Yara Bayoumy and Lou Charbonneau in Beirut; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
