Deadly attacks rock Gaza in tenth month of war

Israel launched deadly airstrikes on Gaza as the war entered its tenth month on Sunday, with fighting raging across the Palestinian territory and renewed diplomatic efforts to end the violence.

Israel has announced that it will send a delegation in the coming days to continue the ceasefire talks with Qatari mediators that recently began in Doha.

But Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuA spokesman said there were still “gaps” over how to reach a ceasefire with Hamas and the release of the hostages.

“It was agreed that Israeli negotiators will travel to Doha next week to continue talks. There are still differences of opinion between the parties,” the spokesman said in a statement on Friday.

Meanwhile, fighting in the Gaza Strip continued unabated. The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Sunday that the bodies of six people, including two children, killed in Israeli strikes had arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in the central Israeli city of Deir al-Balah.

Medics also said on Sunday that six people were killed in an Israeli attack on a house in northern Gaza City.

A day earlier, the Health Ministry in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip said 16 people had been killed in an attack on a school run by the United Nations 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.

The military had previously said it had carried out operations in large parts of the Gaza Strip, including Shujaiya in the north and Deir al-Balah and Rafah in the south.

Shujaiya is one of the areas that the military had previously declared cleared of Hamas, but where fighting has now resumed.

Hamas’ press office and medics said four local media journalists were killed in attacks on Saturday night, and UNRWA said two of its staff were killed.

The UNRWA relief agency, which coordinates much of the aid for Gaza, said 194 of its staff had been killed in the war.

– “The ball is in Israel’s court” –

The United States, which is mediating the ceasefire talks alongside Qatar and Egypt, said it was in favor of an agreement and said there were “pretty good chances” for both sides.

US President Joe Biden announced in May a path to a ceasefire agreement that he said had been proposed by Israel.

These included an initial six-week ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza’s population centers, and the release of hostages held by Palestinian fighters.

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 had been “passed on by the mediators to the American side, which welcomed them and passed them on to the Israeli side.”

“The ball is now in Israel’s court.”

There has been no ceasefire since a week-long pause in November, when 80 Israeli hostages were released in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

Domestic pressure has increased to reach another hostage release agreement, with protests and demonstrations taking place regularly in Israel.

“It is important that we reach an agreement so that all mothers can hug their children and husbands, just as I now hug my mother every morning,” rescued hostage Almog Mair Jan said in a recorded message at a rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday.

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 took 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, mostly civilians, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-ruled Gaza area.

The war has displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population, destroyed much of its homes and other infrastructure, and left nearly 500,000 people suffering from “catastrophic” hunger, UN agencies say.

The biggest obstacle to a ceasefire is Hamas’s demand for a permanent end to the fighting, which Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners firmly reject.

The veteran hawk calls for the release of the hostages and insists that the war will not end until Israel has destroyed Hamas’s ability to fight and govern.

– Attacks in Lebanon –

Israel and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah movement have been engaged in almost daily cross-border shelling since the Gaza war began, but the attacks escalated in the last month.

This raises fears that a major conflagration could break out between the two bitter enemies, which could also draw others, including Iran, into it.

The Israeli army said late Saturday that its fighter jets had attacked Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and that troops were firing artillery fire across the border “throughout the day.”

The previous Saturday, sirens blared over northern Israel and the military announced that it had shot down a “suspicious aerial target” and that two “enemy aircraft” that had taken off from Lebanon had crashed into open terrain.

A source close to Hezbollah said an Israeli drone strike targeted a vehicle in eastern Lebanon on Saturday, killing a Hezbollah official.

Israel said he was part of the group’s air defense unit.

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