AP – Palestinian health officials said Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and yesterday killed at least 17 people, including five children and their parents.
The strikes came on the eve of new talks aimed at reaching a ceasefire in the 10-month war. The United States (US), Qatar and Egypt are hoping to broker an agreement, but the sides remain far apart on several issues after months of indirect negotiations.
The overall Palestinian death toll in the war has almost reached 40,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
One strike hit a family home late on Tuesday in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, which dates back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. It killed five children, ranging in age from two to 11, and their parents, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
An Associated Press reporter who saw the bodies said they had been dismembered by the blast and the two-year-old had been decapitated.
In the nearby Maghazi refugee camp, a strike on a home early yesterday killed four people, the hospital said. In the southern city of Khan Younis, the Health Ministry’s emergency service said first responders recovered the bodies of four men killed in a strike on a residential tower late on Tuesday. Two more people were killed in a strike on a house in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, according to the emergency service.
Health authorities in Gaza did not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes were civilians. The ministry said the toll has reached at least 39,965. It said another 92,294 people have been wounded.
The ministry in its daily update also said the bodies of 36 people killed by Israeli strikes have been brought to local hospitals over the past 24 hours.
It doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.
A senior adviser to US President Joe Biden yesterday said it was critical to take advantage of “this window for diplomatic action” to end the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and ongoing hostilities in Lebanon, fearing that ongoing escalations could “spiral out of control”.
“The more time goes by of escalated tensions the more time goes by of daily conflict the more the odds and the chances go up for accidents, for mistakes, for inadvertent targets to be hit that could easily cause escalation that goes out of control,” Hochstein said in Beirut.
Ceasefire talks are to resume in Doha today between Hamas and Israel through Qatari, Egyptian and American mediators.
