Rescue employees in Gaza said Saturday that greater than 30 people had been killed in Israeli attacks on Palestinian territory, a day after Hamas militants announced the resumption of peace talks.
The civil defense agency said a dawn raid on the house of al-Ghoul’s family in Gaza City killed 11 people, including seven children.
AFP photos from the Shujaiya neighborhood in the Gaza City area show residents combing through smoking rubble. Bodies, including babies, lay on the bottom wrapped in white sheets.
Late Friday evening, Hamas said indirect negotiations with Israel would resume in Qatar the identical evening on a ceasefire agreement and the discharge of hostages. There has been no update since then.
The militant group whose attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 sparked the Gaza war said the talks “will focus on ensuring that the agreement leads to a complete cessation of hostilities (and) the withdrawal of occupation forces.”
Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States have engaged for months in efforts which have didn’t end nearly 15 months of war.
A key obstacle to the agreement was Israel’s reluctance to conform to a everlasting ceasefire.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had authorized Israeli negotiators to proceed talks in Doha.
In December, Qatar expressed optimism that “momentum” was returning to talks after the U.S. election of Donald Trump, who will take office in 16 days.
However, Hamas and Israel subsequently accused one another of setting recent conditions and obstacles.
On January 1, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned of much more intense retaliatory attacks if rocket fire from the Gaza Strip continued and militants didn’t release the hostages still held.
Such rocket launches have turn into rare but have increased since late December, when Israel launched a three-month offensive in the north of the territory.
As time expires for the transfer of power in Washington, President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration notified Congress of an $8 billion arms sale to Israel, a source conversant in the plan said Saturday.
“The Department has informally notified Congress of a proposed $8 billion munitions sale to support Israel’s long-term security by replenishing its stockpile of critical munitions and air defense capabilities,” the official said.
The United States is the biggest supplier of military equipment to Israel.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said the Ghouls’ home in Gaza “was completely destroyed” by the dawn strike.
“It was a two-story building and there are still several people under the rubble,” he said, adding that Israeli drones “also shot at ambulance staff.”
The Israeli army contacted by AFP didn’t immediately comment on the strike.
“We woke as much as an enormous explosion. Everything was shaking,” said neighbor Ahmed Mussa.
“It was a home for children and women. There was no one wanted or posing a threat.”
Elsewhere, the civil defense agency said the Israeli strike killed five security officers tasked with accompanying aid convoys as they passed through the southern city of Khan Yunis.
Bassal accused Israel of “deliberately targeting them” in order to “impact the humanitarian aid supply chain and increase the suffering” of the population.
The army has not yet responded to the accusations.
UN human rights experts said on Monday that the “siege” of northern Gaza appeared to be part of an effort to “permanently displace the local population as a part of the announced annexation of Gaza.”
Rescue workers say 10 other people have died in strikes elsewhere in Gaza.
AFP photos show paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent in Gaza City carrying the body of one of their colleagues, his green jacket thrown over a blanket that covered his body.
The health ministry in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip said a total of 136 people had died in the past 48 hours.
According to AFP data based on official Israeli data, 1,208 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the Hamas attack that sparked the war in Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 45,717 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from Gaza’s health ministry, which the UN considers credible.
The militants also took over 251 hostages. A total of 96 people remain in Gaza, including 34, according to the Israeli military, dead.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigade, released a video on Saturday showing an Israeli hostage held in Gaza since the October 2023 attack.
In an undated, three-and-a-half-minute video that AFP was unable to verify, 19-year-old soldier Liri Albag called in Hebrew on the Israeli government to secure her release.
AFP
AFP
