Gaza war enters tenth month amid Israeli attacks and Hezbollah rockets – Firstpost

July 7, 2024

The Lebanese Hezbollah movement fired another 20 rockets into northern Israel, wounding one person. Image courtesy of Reuters

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 Palestinian terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

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

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 on Thursday that a new proposal from Hamas “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.”

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.

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.

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.