GAZA: Israel carried out deadly air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the war entered its 10th month, with fighting raging across the besieged Palestinian territory and fresh diplomatic efforts underway to achieve a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s Hezbollah fired 20 rockets into northern Israel, resulting in one injury. These attacks were launched in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Efforts towards a ceasefire continued with US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators hoping to end the worst-ever Gaza war, which has caused mass civilian casualties and devastated the besieged territory since October 7 when Israel launched a relentless bombardment campaign in retaliation to Hamas’s attack.
Egypt’s Al-Qahera News reported that Cairo was “hosting US and Israeli delegations to discuss the outstanding points” for a ceasefire and hostage release deal, citing an anonymous high-level official source.
Mediators were in contact with Palestinian group Hamas amid “intensive Egyptian meetings this week with all parties to push efforts” for a ceasefire, said the news report late on Saturday.
Israel has also said it would send a team in the coming days to continue truce talks with Qatari mediators. Despite these efforts, significant challenges persist, with gaps remaining between Israeli authorities and Palestinian groups, complicating prospects for a swift resolution. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said on Friday that “gaps” remained with Hamas.
US President Joe Biden in late May proposed a six-week truce plan involving the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but negotiations stalled following initial discussions. However, a US official said on Thursday that a new proposal from Hamas “moves the process forward and may provide the basis for closing the deal”.
Osama Hamdan, a senior official from Hamas, indicated that mediated discussions had conveyed new ideas which were welcomed by American mediators and transmitted to Israeli counterparts, emphasizing that further progress hinges on Israeli responses.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Gaza, the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate amid relentless Israeli bombardments on Sunday. Medical sources reported multiple casualties from Israeli airstrikes, including children, underscoring the toll on civilians trapped in the conflict zone.
In Gaza City alone, airstrikes targeted residential areas and infrastructure, exacerbating an already dire humanitarian crisis. The Israeli military defended its actions, despite a high number of civilian casualties.
Israeli drones were firing in Gaza City’s Shujaiya district, which has been largely evacuated and rocked by intense bombardments for two weeks.
The health ministry in Gaza said on Sunday that at least 38,153 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in the ongoing Israeli bombardments now in its tenth month.
The toll includes at least 55 deaths over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said. It added that 87,828 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since October 7.
On Saturday, the Gaza health ministry reported that 16 people were killed in a strike on a school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA that was sheltering displaced people in Nuseirat, in central Gaza.
The ongoing Israeli bombardment campaign has uprooted 90 percent of Gaza’s population, left almost 500,000 Palestinian people enduring “catastrophic” hunger and shuttered most hospitals, UN agencies say.
“The situation is very difficult,” said Dr Muhammad Salha, acting director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia.
“There is no fuel in the hospital to work. We only operate the small generator for two hours a day and we have postponed many scheduled operations due to the lack of fuel.”
Amid the Gaza war, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged almost daily cross-border fire and the attacks and rhetoric have escalated over the past month, sparking fears of a full-scale war.
While the exchanges have been largely restricted to the border areas, Israel has repeatedly struck deep inside eastern Lebanon, including on Saturday in a strike that killed a Hezbollah commander.
Early on Sunday, air raid sirens again sounded across northern Israel and the army then reported that 20 rockets were fired, some of which were intercepted by air defence systems.
Hezbollah said that “in response to the attack and assassination that the Israeli enemy carried out”, it had targeted “one of the main bases” in northern Israel, west of Tiberias, with “dozens of Katyusha rockets”.
