Israel steps up bombing of central Gaza, strikes kill 26 people

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Hussam al-Masri

Israeli military strikes killed at least 26 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Thursday, medics said, as forces stepped up their bombardment of central areas and tanks pushed deeper into the north and south of the enclave.

The escalation came a day after Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah began a ceasefire in Lebanon, halting more than a year of hostilities and raising hopes among many Palestinians in Gaza for a similar deal with Hamas, which rules the enclave.

Israel's military campaign - with the avowed intent of eradicating Hamas militants after the group's deadly raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 - has laid waste to the enclave of 2.3 million people.

"I hope a ceasefire will happen like it did in Lebanon... I just want to take my children to see my land, my house, to see what they did to us, I want to live in safety," said Amal Abu Hmeid, a displaced woman in Gaza.

"God willing we will have a truce," she said, sitting in the courtyard of a school sheltering displaced families in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

The courtyard was filled with dirt and water streamed in from where people did their laundry. Clothes were airing outside classrooms as children played nearby.

"(Life) was beautiful (before the war)... Now there is nothing beautiful, it's all gone. Our houses are gone, our brothers are gone, and no one is left. Now we hardly get... one meal a day. We can’t even get bread," Abu Hmeid told Reuters.

Announcing the Lebanon accord on Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said he would now renew his push for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, urging Israel and Hamas to seize the moment.

Months of efforts to negotiate a ceasefire have yielded scant progress, and negotiations are now on hold.

The ceasefire in the parallel conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, took effect before dawn on Wednesday, bringing a halt to hostilities that had escalated sharply in recent months and overshadowed the conflict in Gaza.

GAZA DEATHS

Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 44,200 people and displaced nearly all the enclave's population at least once, Gaza officials say. Vast swathes of the territory are in ruins.

On Thursday, the head of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said at least 70 percent of those killed in Gaza were women and children.

He said the ongoing Israeli offensive in the northern edge of Gaza for the past seven weeks has uprooted 130,000 people.

The Hamas-led militants who attacked southern Israeli communities 13 months ago, triggering the war, killed some 1,200 people and captured more than 250 hostages, Israel has said.

On Thursday, six people were killed in two separate airstrikes on a house and near the hospital of Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, while four others were killed when an Israeli strike hit a motorcycle in Khan Younis in the south, medics said.

Later on Thursday, an Israeli air strike near a tent encampment housing displaced families in eastern Khan Younis killed at least five people and wounded others, medics said.

In Nuseirat, one of Gaza's eight historic refugee camps, Israeli planes carried out several airstrikes, destroying a multi-storey building and hitting roads outside mosques. At least 11 people were killed in those strikes, according to health officials at Al-Awda Hospital in the camp.

They said in a statement that dozens of families were trapped in their homes after some tanks advanced from the northern area of the camp and that ambulance vehicles were unable to reach them because of continued tank fire.

Contacted by Reuters, the Israeli military said its forces were continuing to "strike terror targets as part of the operational activity in the Gaza Strip".

In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, tanks pushed deeper into the northwest area of the city, residents said.