Gaza City - Hamas has offered Israel a one-year truce, a senior official in the radical Islamic movement ruling Gaza said Monday.

Hamas accepts a one-year "hudna," or truce in Arabic, if this included guarantees that Israel will lift its economic blockade of Gaza and "completely" reopen its crossings of the strip, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa on the telephone.

Gaza City - EU Aid Commissioner Louis Michel, touring Gaza, sharply criticized Israel on Monday for the massive destruction he saw around him, but said also Hamas bore an "overwhelming" part of the blame.

"We have to also recall the overwhelming responsibility of Hamas," Michel told local reporters as he toured Jabaliya, a crowded refugee camp north of Gaza City which was hit hard in Israel's 22-day offensive.

Gaza City - Dozens of patients, many of them children, who need urgent treatment abroad have been unable to leave the Gaza Strip via Egypt over the past days, their relatives said Monday.

The West Bank-based administration of caretaker Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was no longer handing out the necessary paperwork to allow them passage through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, they said.

Gaza City  - Five small children, aged 3 to 7, gathered Thursday outside a small kiosk in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, carrying dirty yellow and red plastic jugs to fill up water from a metal tank.

As night fell, Ghassan, the shop owner, sat in darkness, since the enclave still suffers from regular power cuts. A picture of dead Hamas leaders, killed over the years by Israel, hung behind him.

"I do this for humanitarian reasons, for the people," the man said, offering guests a cup of water.

Gaza City - The radical Islamic organisation Hamas said Thursday it would begin Sunday making cash payments to victims of the recent Israeli military offensive against the Gaza Strip.

Taher al Nuni, spokesman for the Hamas-led government in the Strip, said families of those killed in the offensive would receive 1,000 euros, while the wounded would each receive 500 euros.

Owners of destroyed homes would receive 4,000 euros to help rebuilding work, and those whose homes were damaged would receive 2,000 euros.

Gaza City - A leading Palestinian human rights group Thursday put the final Palestinian death toll of a 22-day Israeli offensive in Gaza at 1,285, saying nearly 70 per cent of the fatalities were civilians.

Of the 894 civilians killed, 280 were minors and 111 were women, said the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre For Human Rights (PCHR), whose field workers have been recording the impact of the Israeli onslaught since a fragile truce took effect early Sunday.

In addition, 168 members of Hamas' "civilian" police force were killed, it said in a statement sent to journalists.