CAIRO: Egypt has received encouraging signals from Palestinian resistance group Hamas over a potential Gaza truce and hostage-prisoner swap with Israel, state-linked Al-Qahera News reported on Thursday, citing a high-level source. Meanwhile, Israeli forces attacked a UN-run school in the Gaza Strip killing at least 40 Palestinians, and injuring 73 others on Thursday, health officials told Reuters.
Cairo, along with Qatar and the United States, has been engaged in months of negotiations for a ceasefire aimed at ending the ongoing Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip.
“Hamas leaders have informed us that they are studying the truce proposal seriously and positively,” Al-Qahera quoted the source as saying, AFP reported.
The source, who was not named, said the Palestinian resistance group was expected to respond to the proposal in the coming days.
Egypt, which invited Hamas leaders to negotiations in Cairo, had “received positive signs from the Palestinian movement signaling its aspiration for a ceasefire”, the source added.
The comments came a day after Hamas representatives met in Doha with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani and Egypt’s intelligence chief Abbas Kamel.
Apart from a seven-day ceasefire in November, during which more than 100 hostages were released in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, mediation efforts have failed to stop the conflict.
Last week US President Joe Biden presented a “roadmap to an enduring ceasefire” that would see Israel withdraw from Gaza’s population centres and Hamas release hostages. On Thursday, Biden and 16 other world leaders urged Hamas to accept the proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Since October 7 last year, Israel has launched has launched a relentless bombardment campaign in Gaza killing at least 36,654 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.
The director of the Gaza government media office Ismail Al-Thawabta and a Gaza health ministry official told Reuters on Thursday 40 people were killed and 73 were wounded in an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat school in the Gaza Strip.
The two officials added that 14 children and 9 women were killed in the strike.
Earlier, UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said that the number of those reported killed in the Israeli offensive on the Nuseirat school was between 35 and 45, adding the number could not be confirmed at this stage.
The latest operations appear to mark a widening of Israel’s nearly eight-month offensive, launched after the October 7 attack.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah received at least 30 bodies from the strike on the school and another six from a separate strike on a home, according to hospital records and an Associated Press reporter at the hospital.
The Israeli military said its fighter jets struck the school run by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
UNRWA schools across Gaza have functioned as shelters since the start of the Israeli bombardment, which has displaced most of the territory’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians.
The international charity said Wednesday in a post on X that Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital is struggling to treat “a huge influx of patients, many of them arriving with severe burns, shrapnel wounds, fractures, and other traumatic injuries.”
Gaza’s health system has nearly collapsed through almost eight months of war. The hospital, which was treating some 700 wounded and sick people before the latest strikes, said Wednesday that one of its two electrical generators had stopped working, threatening its ability to keep operating ventilators and incubators for premature babies.
Israel has routinely launched airstrikes in all parts of Gaza since the start of the war and has carried out massive ground operations in the territory’s two largest cities, Gaza City and Khan Younis, that left much of them in ruins.
The military waged an offensive earlier this year for several weeks in Bureij and several other nearby refugee camps in central Gaza.
Troops pulled out of the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza last Friday after weeks of Israeli bombardment caused widespread destruction. First responders have recovered the bodies of 360 people, mostly women and children, killed during the battles.
Israel sent troops into Rafah last month in what it said was a limited incursion, but those forces are now operating in central parts of Gaza’s southernmost city. More than 1 million Palestinian people have fled Rafah since the start of the operation, with many heading toward central Gaza.
