Gaza Cease-fire Emerged Amid Mix of Political, Internal Pressures

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• JIM LEHRER:

  And finally tonight, the Gaza cease-fire. We start with a report from Gaza. Independent Television News correspondent Jonathan Miller was among the Western reporters entering the territory after the fighting stopped.

• JONATHAN MILLER:

  Gaza's government buildings have been pummeled, these the Ministries of Finance, Interior and Foreign Affairs, the infrastructure of a future independent Palestinian state. To Gazans, it's evidence that Israel never wanted one.

  We drove through Gaza City past the wreckage of its 22-day-long bombardment. This was an ambulance; 13 paramedics have been killed in this complex. We saw two graveyards, one bombed, the other driven over by tanks. I saw the tops of three minarets blown clean off.

  We arrived at the U.N.-run Beit Lahia primary school, which took direct hits on Saturday morning, the very last day of the war. One thousand eight hundred and ninety-one refugees were sheltering here.

  A worker here filmed on his mobile phone the aftermath of the first two white phosphorous shells to explode at 6:45 in the morning. As he was filming, another shell slammed into the school, this time an artillery round.

  It caused mayhem. Ambulances already on the scene caught up in it all. Two dead, 14 injured. You can see white phosphorous burning all over the playground. Another two bombs then exploded. Four more were killed just outside.

  Beit Lahia was the third U.N. school to be hit in an act condemned as outrageous by the U.N. secretary-general.

  The school authorities have been gathering up some of the shrapnel and the shell casings of what hit the school in the incident of the 17th of January. This bit of wrecked metal here is, believe it or not, the remains of one of the four phosphorous bombs which exploded over the school, burning some of the children.

  This big thing here is either a tank shell or an artillery piece. This is what hit the balcony just up there, killing two small children and blowing the legs off their 19-year-old cousin.

  The Israeli army says that it hit schools because they had people firing. Is it possible that there were Hamas fighters shooting from inside this school?

  "Absolutely not," they said. "There were definitely no militants in here. People were sleeping. There was no gunfire."

  The Israelis insisted to us tonight that they only fire at schools when they're fired at first.

  Mahmoud is 13. He was badly wounded by shrapnel at the start of the war. Three weeks later, when the bombs hit the school, he suffered white phosphorous burns.

  "I was washing my face upstairs," he told me. "I'd just gone into the school room when the shell hit the balcony. When I escaped outside, the phosphorous bomb exploded. It went on my arm."

  Each side in this conflict has accused the other of war crimes.

• JIM LEHRER:

  And to Margaret Warner.