Deadly fighting in Gaza, Hezbollah rocket attacks in 10th month of war

Israel carried out deadly air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the war entered its tenth month. Fighting rages across the Palestinian territory and new diplomatic efforts are underway to end the violence.

The Lebanese Hezbollah movement fired another 20 rockets into northern Israel, wounding one person, in the latest cross-border attacks in solidarity with the militant Palestinian group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Efforts to reach a ceasefire continued, with mediators from the United States, Qatar and Egypt hoping to end Gaza’s worst war ever, which has claimed numerous civilian lives and devastated the coastal region since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.

The Egyptian news agency Al-Qahera News reported, citing an anonymous senior official source, that Cairo was hosting “Israeli and American delegations to discuss the outstanding issues” related to a ceasefire and an agreement to release the hostages.

The mediators are in contact with Hamas as part of “intensive Egyptian meetings with all parties this week to advance efforts” toward a ceasefire, the news report said late Saturday, without providing further details or dates.

Israel has also announced that it will send a delegation in the coming days to continue talks with Qatari mediators, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said on Friday that there were still “gaps” with Hamas.

At the end of May, US President Joe Biden announced a plan that initially called for a six-week ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

Talks subsequently stalled, but a US official said Thursday that a new Hamas proposal “advances the process and could form the basis for concluding the agreement.”

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told AFP that the group’s new ideas were “passed on by the mediators to the American side, which welcomed them and passed them on to the Israeli side,” adding that “the ball is now in Israel’s court.”

– Serious collisions –

Fighting and bombings in the besieged Gaza Strip continued unabated on Sunday, with doctors and rescue workers in the Hamas-controlled area reporting more deaths in several attacks.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said the bodies of six people, including two children, were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah.

And medics said six people were killed in an attack on a house in Gaza City and three in another elsewhere in Gaza’s largest metropolitan area.

An AFP correspondent said Israeli drones fired on Gaza’s Shujaiya neighborhood, which has been largely evacuated for two weeks and is seeing heavy fighting.

The Israeli army said its troops in Shujaiya “eliminated several terrorists, destroyed terror infrastructure and discovered numerous weapons, including explosive devices, AK-47 rifles, machine guns and pistols.”

It also said that over the past day, 30 “terrorists” had been killed in the far south of Rafah and that Israeli forces had carried out an operation in nearby Khan Yunis, where Hamas had taken up positions in a town hall.

On Saturday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said 16 people were killed in an attack on a school run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) that housed displaced people in Nuseirat in central Gaza.

The Israeli military said its planes had targeted “terrorists” operating in the vicinity of the Al-Jawni school.

– “Catastrophic hunger” –

The war began with Hamas’ unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7, which left 1,195 people, mostly civilians, dead, according to an AFP count based on Israeli figures.

The militants also captured 251 hostages, 116 of whom are still in the Gaza Strip. According to the military, 42 of them are dead.

In response, Israel launched a military offensive that killed at least 38,098 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-ruled territory.

The war has displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population, nearly 500,000 people are suffering from “catastrophic” hunger and most hospitals are closed, UN agencies say.

“The situation is very difficult,” said Dr. Muhammad Salha, deputy director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia.

“The hospital has no fuel to operate. We only run the small generator for two hours a day and have had to postpone many planned surgeries due to the lack of fuel.”

– Hezbollah rockets –

During the Gaza war, there were almost daily cross-border shelling attacks between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah. In the last month, the attacks and rhetoric have escalated, fuelling fears of a full-scale war.

Although the clashes are largely limited to the border areas, Israel has repeatedly struck deep in eastern Lebanon. On Saturday, for example, there was an attack in which a Hezbollah member was killed.

Early Sunday, air raid sirens sounded again throughout northern Israel and the army reported that 20 rockets had been fired. Some of them were intercepted by air defense systems.

One person was injured by shrapnel in Kfar Zeitim near Tiberias, about 30 kilometers inside Israel, local police said, adding that the person’s condition was stable.

Hezbollah said it had attacked “one of its most important bases” in northern Israel, west of Tiberias, with “dozens of Katyusha rockets” “in response to the attack and assassination by the Israeli enemy.”

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