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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Egypt on Tuesday as part of his latest Middle East crisis tour, seeking a new ceasefire and "an enduring end" to the Israel-Hamas war.
Heavy strikes and fighting in Gaza killed at least 107 people in the past 24 hours, said the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory that has been under almost four months of bombardment.
Fears grew for more than a million Palestinians crowded into the far southern Rafah area as the battlefront draws ever closer in Israel's campaign to eradicate Hamas over the October 7 attack.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned on Monday that the military "will reach places where we have not yet fought... right up to the last Hamas bastion, which is Rafah," on the Egyptian border.
Palestinian Raed al-Bardani, 32, who has been displaced multiple times and now lives in Rafah with his wife and their four children, charged that "the goal is to destroy Rafah because it is the only area that the occupation has not yet destroyed".
"Where will we go if they storm Rafah?" he asked. "Israel will only stop when they have annihilated the people of Gaza."
Blinken -- on his fifth regional tour since the bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out -- met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a day after he held talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.
The US top envoy then left for Qatar and was later to head to Israel, hoping to shore up support for a truce deal that was hashed out in Paris in January but has not yet been signed by either Hamas or Israel.
Israeli troops, with air and naval support, have been engaged in heavy combat centered on Gaza's main southern city of Khan Yunis, the hometown of Hamas's Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, much of which has been reduced to rubble.
With AFP
Heavy strikes and fighting in Gaza killed at least 107 people in the past 24 hours, said the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory that has been under almost four months of bombardment.
Fears grew for more than a million Palestinians crowded into the far southern Rafah area as the battlefront draws ever closer in Israel's campaign to eradicate Hamas over the October 7 attack.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned on Monday that the military "will reach places where we have not yet fought... right up to the last Hamas bastion, which is Rafah," on the Egyptian border.
Palestinian Raed al-Bardani, 32, who has been displaced multiple times and now lives in Rafah with his wife and their four children, charged that "the goal is to destroy Rafah because it is the only area that the occupation has not yet destroyed".
"Where will we go if they storm Rafah?" he asked. "Israel will only stop when they have annihilated the people of Gaza."
Blinken -- on his fifth regional tour since the bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out -- met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a day after he held talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.
The US top envoy then left for Qatar and was later to head to Israel, hoping to shore up support for a truce deal that was hashed out in Paris in January but has not yet been signed by either Hamas or Israel.
Israeli troops, with air and naval support, have been engaged in heavy combat centered on Gaza's main southern city of Khan Yunis, the hometown of Hamas's Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, much of which has been reduced to rubble.
With AFP
This Is Beirut
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