LAST UPDATE | 17 Aug
GAZA’S CIVIL DEFENCE agency said an Israeli airstrike in the early hours of Saturday killed 15 people from a Palestinian family, including nine children and three women.
The strike hit the home of the Ajlah family in Al-Zawaida neighbourhood of central Gaza, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP. The Israeli military did not offer an immediate comment.
“The toll from the Israeli strike on the Ajlah family home and their warehouse in Al-Zawaida is 15 dead,” Bassal said.
Bassal gave a list of those killed, including nine children and three women. A witness said the strike took place shortly after midnight.
“Three rockets hit the house directly,” Ahmed Abu al-Ghoul told AFP as rescuers pulled bodies from the rubble of the flattened house.
There were a lot of children and women inside… What have they done to deserve this?
AFPTV footage of the aftermath, captured after dawn, showed rescuers searching for bodies under piles of collapsed concrete blocks.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon today killed 10 Syrians, as the Israeli military reported hitting weapons stores of the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement.
The toll from the strike in the Nabatieh area is one of the largest in southern Lebanon since Hezbollah and Israeli forces began exchanging near-daily fire over their border after war in the Gaza Strip began in October.
International mediators have been trying to reach a Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which diplomats say could help to avert a wider war in which Lebanon would be on the front line.
The death toll from the latest strike included “a woman and her two children” while five other people were wounded, most of them also Syrian, Lebanon’s health ministry said in a statement.
Hamas said on Friday it rejects “new conditions” in a Gaza ceasefire proposal that US-led mediators presented during two days of talks in Qatar.
Diplomatic efforts have so far failed to alleviate the suffering endured over more than 10 months of war, but US President Joe Biden insisted after the latest round of talks that “we are closer than we have ever been”.
He is sending US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Israel this weekend to push the latest proposal, the State Department said.
Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators have been seeking to finalise details of a framework initially outlined by Biden in May, which he said Israel had proposed.
In a joint statement, the mediators said they had presented both sides with a proposal that “bridges remaining gaps” and will continue working in the coming days to hash out the specifics on humanitarian provisions and the hostage-prisoners swap.
Talks aiming to secure a rapid deal are set to resume in Cairo “before the end of next week”.
Hamas, which did not attend the Doha talks, swiftly announced its opposition to what it called “new conditions” from Israel in the latest plan.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on mediators to “pressure” Hamas to accept Biden’s framework.
Threats by Iran and its proxies to attack Israel have added renewed urgency to the efforts to hammer out a Gaza ceasefire, with mediators seeking a deal in the hopes of dousing a wider regional conflict.
“No one in the region should take actions to undermine this process,” Biden warned, later telling reporters, “There’s just a couple more issues, I think we’ve got a shot.”
An informed source told AFP Hamas had objected to conditions about keeping Israeli troops on Gaza’s border with Egypt and terms related to the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages.
Western ally Jordan, however, put the blame squarely on Netanyahu for blocking a deal, with Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi urging pressure “by everyone who wishes to see this through to completion”.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and his French counterpart Stephane Sejourne held talks in Israel on Friday to press the deal.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz told his visiting counterparts he expects foreign support if Iran seeks to avenge the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Sejourne replied that it would be “inappropriate” to discuss responding to any attack while diplomacy to stop it from happening is in high gear.
A senior US official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, said Iran would face “cataclysmic” consequences if it strikes Israel.
Hamas’s unprecedented 7 October attack on Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead. More than 100 were freed during a one-week truce in November.
On Thursday, the toll from Israel’s retaliatory military campaign topped 40,000, according to the health ministry in Gaza, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant casualties.
The war has devastated the besieged territory’s healthcare infrastructure, prompting repeated warnings from the World Health Organization about the risk of preventable diseases.
On Friday, the Palestinian health ministry reported an unvaccinated 10-month-old child in Gaza had been diagnosed with polio, the territory’s first case in 25 years, according to the WHO.
The announcement came hours after UN chief Antonio Guterres called for two seven-day breaks in the Gaza war to vaccinate more than 640,000 children against type 2 poliovirus, which was first detected in the territory’s wastewater in June.
As truce talks were underway, thousands of civilians were on the move again inside the Palestinian territory after the Israeli military issued fresh evacuation orders ahead of imminent military action.
The UN estimated the orders affect more than 170,000 people, forcing them to pack into the shrinking remnants of an area declared a humanitarian safe zone.
The area where people have been told to relocate makes up just 11% of Gaza, according to the UN.
“During each round of negotiations, they exert pressure by forcing evacuations and committing massacres,” Issa Murad, a Palestinian displaced to Deir al-Balah, said of the Israeli forces.
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