Deir al-Balah: The war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas fighters has now killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, Palestinian health officials said Monday, as mostly stalled cease-fire talks appear to have gained ground.
Qatar, Egypt and the United States have renewed efforts in recent days to broker a ceasefire agreement, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Monday that he believed negotiators were closer to an agreement than at any time since the previous ceasefire, which lasted a week. In November 2023, 105 hostages were released.
“We all believe that an opportunity is being created to pursue the need for Hamas to become more flexible, and I hope to move forward with a practical step in that process,” Katz said before a closed-door meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. .
Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a key ally of Hamas, agreed to a ceasefire late last month.
Palestinian health officials updated Gaza’s death toll to 45,028. They said 106,962 others had been injured since the war began, and warned that the true toll was higher because thousands of bodies were buried under rubble or in places inaccessible to medics.
The ministry’s count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it said more than half were women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 rebels without providing evidence.
The war is the deadliest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas so far, killing about 2% of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.
Another airstrike hit a shelter, killing a family More than 50 dead have been brought to hospitals in the bombed area in the past 24 hours, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Palestinian medics said 10 people, including a family of four, were killed in overnight Israeli strikes in the eastern Sizayya neighborhood of Gaza City.
Israel has claimed that Hamas is responsible for the civilian deaths because it operates from within the densely populated civilian areas of the Gaza Strip. Rights groups and Palestinians say Israel has failed to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths.
The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and kidnapping another 250. Israel responded with heavy bombardment and ground incursions into Palestinian enclaves. About 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third are believed to have been killed. Most of the rest were released during a ceasefire last year.
At least 13 people, including six children and two women, were killed in a separate strike at a school in the southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday, Nasser Hospital said. The hospital initially said 16 people had died in the strike but later said three bodies were from a separate strike.
Louise Waterridge, a spokeswoman for the United Nations relief agency for the Palestinians, said she had visited children injured in Sunday’s attack. Among them, a 17-year-old girl suffered severe leg injuries and shrapnel injuries.
She survived, along with her twin sister and three other sisters, Wateridge said, but their mother was killed. Wateridge said a sister described how “their mother’s bones were crushed under the rubble. There was nothing they could do to save her. “
The Israeli military said it struck Hamas fighters operating inside a command center in a compound that served as Khan Younis’ school. Could not provide evidence.
A Palestinian journalist is mourned In Nuseirat urban refugee camp in central Gaza, mourners gathered for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network who was killed Sunday in an attack on Gaza’s Civil Defense Agency. They carried his body along the road with his bulletproof vest.
According to Al Jazeera, 39-year-old Ahmed Baker al-Louh was covering the rescue of a family injured in an earlier bombing when he was killed.
According to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, three civil defense personnel including the local head of the agency were killed in the strike. Civil Defense is the main rescue agency in Gaza and operates under the government run by Hamas.
The International Federation of Journalists said last week that 104 journalists and media workers will be killed in 2024, with more than half in Gaza.
The Israeli military said its strikes targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters at a command center embedded in the offices of the “Civil Defense” organization. It accused the journalist of being a member of Islamic Jihad, which his colleagues in Gaza denied.
Gaza’s civil defense denied claims that militants were operating from the site.
“We were shocked by the Israeli occupation statement,” Mahmoud al-Lah, the journalist’s brother, told The Associated Press. “These claims are false and misleading to cover up this crime.”