With a renewed ceasefire push in the eight-month-old Gaza war stalled, Israel bombarded central and southern areas again yesterday, killing at least 28 Palestinians, and tank forces advanced to the western edges of Rafah.
US-backed Qatari and Egyptian mediators have tried again this week to reconcile clashing demands preventing a halt to the hostilities, a release of Israeli hostages and Palestinians jailed in Israel, and an unrestricted flow of aid into Gaza to alleviate a humanitarian disaster. But sources close to the talks said there were still no signs of a breakthrough.
A month after rumbling into Rafah in what Israel said was an assault to wipe out Hamas’ last intact combat units, tank-led forces have advanced to the southwest fringes of the city that skirts the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, residents said.
They said tanks were stationed in the Al Izba district near the Mediterranean coast while snipers had commandeered some buildings and high ground, trapping people in their homes. They said Israeli machinegun fire had made it too dangerous to go out.
Gaza health officials said two Palestinians had been killed and several wounded in western Rafah from tank shelling there. In central Gaza, Palestinian medics said Israeli bombardments killed at least 15 people died overnight.
“I think the occupation forces are trying to reach the beach area of Rafah. The raids and the bombing overnight were tactical, they entered under heavy fire and then retreated,” one Palestinian resident told Reuters.
In north Gaza, three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a Gaza City school building that was sheltering displaced families, rescue workers said.
The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas gunmen operating from a container inside the school premises, similar to its explanation for an air strike on a UN school building in Al Nuseirat in central Gaza on Thursday that medics said killed 40 people including 14 children. Around 6,000 displaced people were sheltering at that site, the UN said.
The Israeli military has published the identity of what it said were 17 fighters concealed in the compound who it killed in Thursday’s strike.
Hamas has rejected Israel’s assertion that the school had hidden a Hamas command post.
Israel’s military blames Hamas for Gaza’s high civilian death toll, accusing it of operating within densely populated neighbourhoods, schools and hospitals as cover, something it denies. UN and humanitarian officials accuse Israel of using disproportionate force in the war, which it denies. Hamas accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilian locations, which Israel also denies.
Israel has ruled out peace until Hamas is eradicated, and much of Gaza lies in ruins, but Hamas has proven resilient, with fighters resurfacing to fight in areas where Israeli forces had previously declared to have defeated them and pulled back.
Hamas precipitated the war when fighters stormed from Israeli-blockaded Gaza into southern Israel in a lightning strike last October 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages back to the enclave, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Gaza since then has killed at least 36,731 people, including 77 in the past 24 hours, Gaza’s health ministry said in an update yesterday. Thousands more are feared buried dead under rubble, with most of the 2.3 million population displaced.
Since a brief week-long truce in November, repeated attempts to arrange a ceasefire have failed, with Hamas insisting on a permanent end to the war and full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will return to the Middle East next week, part of a push by Washington to get Israel and Hamas to take up the ceasefire proposal laid out last week by US President Joe Biden.
Israel says it is prepared to discuss only temporary pauses in the hostilities until the Islamist militant group, which has ruled the narrow, impoverished enclave since 2007, is wiped out and Gaza poses no more security threat.
The Palestinian president’s spokesperson yesterday said a decision to add Israel’s military to a global list of offenders who have committed violations against children is “a step closer to holding Israel accountable for its crimes”.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh made his comment to Reuters after Israel’s UN envoy said he had been officially notified of the decision by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to add the Israeli military to the list.
Yemen’s Houthis yesterday said they targeted two vessels in the Red Sea with drones and missiles, but there was no independent confirmation of the purported attacks.
The group targeted the Elbella and AAL GENOA vessels with “a number of drones and ballistic and naval missiles”, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesman Yahya Saree said in a televised speech.
Saree did not specify the date on which the strikes were carried out. Reuters did not receive any reports of incidents in the Red Sea yesterday.
&uuid=(email))