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. The Islamist group 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.
Israel launched air raids on the Gaza Strip on December 27 and ground troops moved in a week later.
Without an accord with Hamas, diplomats said they feared Israel would let only a trickle of goods through Gaza's border crossings, hampering reconstruction and creating more hardship for its 1.5 million people.
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," the Israeli official said, adding that Israel would reserve the right to act if Hamas continued firing or launched rockets across the border.
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.
Israeli forces attacked 50 targets in the coastal enclave overnight. 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.
In addition to declaring a unilateral cease-fire, Israeli officials said they expected Israel and Egypt to announce an agreement on increased security along the Gaza-Egyptian border.
Under that agreement, they said, the Rafah border crossing would only reopen 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.
Abbas left for Cairo and his aides said he would meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak there on Sunday morning.
In a televised address, Mubarak called on Israel to end its military operations immediately and said his country would call for a meeting on post-war reconstruction.
Hamas drove Abbas's forces from Gaza in June 2007, 18 months after defeating his secular Fatah faction in a Palestinian election. It no longer recognises him as president.
TRUCE TERMS
Gaza's crossings with Israel were likely to open initially only for humanitarian supplies, the Israeli officials said. Israeli leaders want to link opening the passages fully to talks over Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held in Gaza by Hamas.
Hamas negotiators were due to meet Egyptian officials to discuss Israel's response to truce terms they have offered.
"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.
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's takeover of Gaza, Israel has tightened an economic siege, allowing in mainly relief goods. Gaza's needs are vastly greater now after three weeks of destruction.
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 wounded, Hamas health officials said.
Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by rockets fired from Gaza, have been killed during the offensive.
Four soldiers were seriously wounded on Saturday, possibly by "friendly fire," an Israeli military spokesman said.
Ging, the UNRWA chief, said Israeli tank fire killed the two brothers, aged 5 and 7, in an UNRWA school in the northern town of Beit Lahiya where they had sought refuge. Their mother, who was among 14 wounded, had her legs blown off.
"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.
Hamas rocket fire has dwindled but not ceased. Seven rockets hit Israel on Saturday, causing no casualties, the army said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is visiting the Middle East, again called for an end to the conflict.
(Writing by Alistair Lyon; Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem, Alaa Shahine in Cairo, and Yara Bayoumy and Lou Charbonneau in Beirut)
