Word: rice
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...Sunday, a few hours after Rice?s press conference, more bad news arrived when U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan announced that the Israeli Defense Ministry had asked U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon to evacuate two more villages before sunset, suggesting they would meet Qana?s fate.? By Sunday evening, Rice had apparently decided that she had done all she could do in Jerusalem and made it known she was heading back to Washington Monday morning...
...Several things Rice and her associates said were evidence of growing frustration with Israel. She said she had urged the Israelis to exercise restraint in their attacks on Lebanon. Though she did make reference to Hizballah rockets hitting northern Israel, she did not repeat her usual line that the Israelis have the right to defend themselves. When asked where she would go or what she would do next to work for the ceasefire, she repeated again and again that she was staying in Jerusalem: ?My work today is here...
...Still, Rice defended the Bush administration?s refusal to join other world leders in demanding that Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire. She pointed out that Sunday?s bombing was at the same village where? Israel hit a U.N. outpost in 1996, killing 106 people who had taken refuge there. (A U.N. investigation of that incident concluded that it was ?unlikely? that the shelling was a mistake - a judgment Israel has never accepted.) This tragedy, she said, underscored the need for a ?sustainable? ceasefire...
...After Rice appeared before the cameras, a U.S. official involved in her diplomacy cast the U.S. view in stronger terms. ?We don?t want to accept any pretext for delaying the ceasefire,? he said. Asked what ?pretext? meant, he said, ?I?ve said enough.? But he also noted, ?We?re making very clear to Israelis our distress at this incident. We?re looking to wrap things up and then move the action to New York...
...Indeed, Rice and her team had already been working with the knowledge that Israel was not going to cease its attacks soon. The night before, she had had dinner with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who told her that Israel needed 10 days to two weeks to complete its military operations. The attack on Qana - apparently the site of rocket launches against Israel - occured shortly after midnight...