Gaza City

Gaza City/Tel Aviv - Israel pulled more troops out of Gaza overnight, as a fragile truce which ended three weeks of deadly and destructive attacks in the strip entered its second day Monday.

"We are continuing to dilute the forces," a military official told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Reserve soldiers who had pulled out, however, were not yet being released and remained on high alert.

Gazans and Israelis meanwhile woke up after a relatively quiet night, with the military official saying no rockets landed in southern Israel and the military carrying out no air-strikes in response.

Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt - German Chancellor Angela Merkel, attending the Sharm el-Sheikh summit on the Gaza crisis, called Sunday for an end to weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip.

London - International envoy to the Middle East Tony Blair emphasized the continued need to move toward a two-state solution in order to maintain the peace in Gaza, in a Sunday interview with the BBC.

Blair, a former British prime minister, said that there needed to be "a truly credible process" for establishing the two states.

"Even the short-term is fragile and the long-term sustainability of this depends absolutely and intimately on re-vitalising the whole of the peace process," he told BBC Radio
4's The World This Weekend.

Washington, Jan. 18 : After he assumes office as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama is planning to reach out to the Islamic world to reassure Muslims.

According to The Times, he intends to give a speech in an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office as a sign of his engagement.

He has not said where. It could be Egypt, Pakistan, or even Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where he spent part of his childhood.

Damascus  - The exiled number two of the Islamist movement Hamas, Mussa Abu Marzuq, said Sunday an agreement was reached between the Palestinian factions for a one-week truce to allow Israeli troops to withdraw from Gaza.

Delivering a speech on Syrian state television, where the meeting of the Palestinian factions took place, Abu Murzuq said: "We in the Palestinian resistance movements announce a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and demand that enemy forces withdraw in one week and open all the border crossings to allow the entry of humanitarian aid essential needs."

He added that the movement is ready to accept all political efforts, particularly those of the Egyptians, Turks, Syrians and Qataris, to reach an agreement that meets Hamas' demands.