Fighting and shelling in besieged Gaza continued unabated on Sunday (File)
Gaza:
Israel carried out deadly airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the war entered its tenth month, with intense fighting across the Palestinian territory and new diplomatic efforts underway to halt the violence.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement fired another 20 rockets into northern Israel, leaving one person injured, in the latest cross-border attacks launched in solidarity with the Gaza-based Palestinian group Hamas.
Efforts for a truce continued with US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators hoping to stop the worst-ever war in Gaza, which has caused mass civilian casualties and devastated the coastal territory since Hamas’ attack on Israel in 7 of October.
Egypt’s Al-Qahera News reported that Cairo was “hosting Israeli and American delegations to discuss outstanding points” for a ceasefire and hostage release agreement, citing an unnamed high-level official source.
Mediators were in contact with Hamas amid “intense Egyptian meetings this week with all parties to push forward efforts” for a truce, the report said late on Saturday, without providing further details or dates.
Israel also said it would send a delegation in the coming days to continue negotiations with Qatari mediators, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said on Friday that there were still “gaps” with Hamas.
US President Joe Biden announced a plan in late May that included an initial six-week truce and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Negotiations later stalled, but a U.S. official said Thursday that a new Hamas proposal “moves the process forward and could provide the basis for reaching the deal.”
A senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, told AFP that the group’s new ideas were “transmitted by the mediators to the American side, which welcomed them and transmitted them to the Israeli side”, adding that “now the ball is in the Israeli court”.
Heavy clashes
Fighting and shelling in besieged Gaza continued unabated on Sunday, with doctors and emergency services in Hamas-controlled territory reporting even more deaths in several attacks.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said the bodies of six people, including two children, were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah.
And paramedics said six people were killed in an attack on a house in Gaza City and three elsewhere in Gaza’s largest urban area.
An AFP correspondent said Israeli drones were firing in the Shujaiya district of Gaza City, which has been largely evacuated and rocked by intense fighting for two weeks.
The Israeli army said that in Shujaiya, its “troops eliminated several terrorists, dismantled terrorist infrastructure sites and located numerous weapons, including explosive devices, AK-47 rifles, machine guns and pistols.”
He also said that 30 “terrorists” had been killed in the southern tip of Rafah over the past day and that Israeli forces had carried out an operation in nearby Khan Yunis, where Hamas took up position in a municipal building.
On Saturday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said 16 people were killed in an attack on a school run by the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) that was housing displaced people in Nuseirat in central Gaza.
The Israeli military said its aircraft were targeting “terrorists” operating in the vicinity of the Al-Jawni school.
‘Catastrophic famine’
The war began with Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP calculation based on Israeli figures.
Hamas also captured 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 who the military says are dead.
In response, Israel carried out a military offensive that killed at least 38,098 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data from the Ministry of Health in the territory governed by Hamas.
The war has uprooted 90 percent of Gaza’s population, left nearly 500,000 people suffering “catastrophic” famine and closed 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 two hours a day and postpone many scheduled operations due to lack of fuel.”
Hezbollah rockets
Amid the war in Gaza, Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have exchanged fire almost daily across the border and attacks and rhetoric have increased over the past month, raising fears of a full-scale war.
Although exchanges have largely been restricted to border areas, Israel has repeatedly struck in the interior of eastern Lebanon, including on Saturday an attack that killed a Hezbollah operative.
On Sunday morning, air raid sirens sounded again across northern Israel and the army then reported that 20 rockets had been fired, some of which were intercepted by air defense systems.
One person was injured by shrapnel in Kfar Zeitim, near Tiberias, about 30 kilometers (more than 18 miles) inside Israel, local police said, adding that his condition was stable.
Hezbollah said that “in response to the attack and assassination that the Israeli enemy carried out”, it targeted “one of the main bases” in northern Israel, west of Tiberias, with “dozens of Katyusha rockets”.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This story originally appeared on Ndtv.com read the full story
