Israeli ground forces withdrew from the Gaza Strip ahead of the truce, Isreali military spokesman said their main goal of destroying cross-border infiltration tunnels had been completed.

Troops and tanks would be “redeployed in defensive positions outside the Gaza Strip and we will maintain those defensive positions”, spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said, reflecting Israeli readiness to resume fighting if attacked.

Several previous attempts by Egypt and other regional powers, overseen by the United States and United Nations, failed to calm the worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in two years.

Gaza officials say the war has killed 1,834 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed since fighting began on July 8, after a surge in Palestinian rocket launches.

Israel was expected to send delegates to join talks in Cairo to cement a longer-term deal during the course of the truce.

For now, Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel’s Army Radio: “There are no agreements. As we have already said, quiet will be answered with quiet.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Islamist group had also informed Egypt “of its acceptance of a 72-hour period of calm”.

The US State Department praised the truce and urged the parties to “respect it completely”.

Skepticism over ceasefire

Reporting from the ground in Gaza, FRANCE 24’s Gallagher Fenwick said civilians living in the Palestinian enclave were greeting the truce with cautious enthusiasm, rushing to the stores to stock up on goods in case it does not hold.

“People are really hoping that a lasting ceasefire will come into effect but (they) know that the risk that it will be broken, that it will unravel yet another time, is high.”

Fenwick said that since so many previous ceasefire attempts have failed already, “they’re very skeptical that this one will produce a satisfactory result”.

Efforts to cement the ceasefire into a lasting truce could prove difficult, with the sides far apart on key demands, and each rejecting the other’s legitimacy. Hamas rejects Israel’s existence, and vows to destroy it, while Israel denounces Hamas as a terrorist group and eschews any ties.

Besides the truce, Palestinians demand an end to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on impoverished Gaza and the release of prisoners including the ones Israel arrested in a June crackdown in the occupied West Bank after three Jewish seminary students were kidnapped and killed.

Israel has resisted those demands in the past.

Signs violence is abating

Although Israeli officials said that the last of 32 known tunnels dug by Hamas inside Gaza had been destroyed overnight, some may have gone undetected and the army was poised to strike at these in the future.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also wants to disarm Hamas and demilitarise Gaza, stripping of their arsenals guerrillas who launched more than 3,300 rockets and mortar bombs at Israel this past month. Hamas has ruled that out.

Egypt has positioned itself as a mediator in successive Gaza conflicts but, like Israel, its current administration views Hamas as a security threat.

The violence had shown signs of abating early on Tuesday, with few reported incidents.

Two rockets were fired at a southern Israeli city, Ashkelon, and Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor shot them down. There were no casualties.

On Monday, Palestinians accused Israel of bombing a refugee camp in Gaza City, killing an eight-year-old girl and wounding 29 people in a disruption of what was supposed to have been a seven-hour humanitarian ceasefire.

A military spokeswoman disputed this, saying Israel had withheld aerial fire for seven hours on Monday, in a move to free up aid supplies and allow some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the war to go home.

Media in Britain reported that a British aid worker was killed on Sunday during an Israeli strike in Rafah while he was delivering supplies to a hospital. The British Foreign Office said it was looking into the report.

(FRANCE 24)