US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Arab foreign ministers in Jordan on Saturday, seeking resolution amid the ongoing Gaza war. Israel, responding to Hamas attacks, still refuses a truce until hostages were released, leading to civilian casualties and displacement in Gaza.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken began meetings with Arab foreign ministers in Jordan on Saturday, seeking to mitigate the nearly month-long Gaza war after Israel resisted his calls for a humanitarian pause.
The Israeli army said its ground forces had operated in southern Gaza overnight, after deadly strikes hit an ambulance convoy and a school-turned-refugee shelter in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Israeli troops have encircled Gaza’s largest city, trying to crush Hamas in retaliation for October 7 raids that Israeli officials say killed an estimated 1,400 people inside Israel, most of them civilians.
The health ministry in Gaza, run by Hamas, says more than 9,200 Gazans, mostly women and children, have been killed in the Israeli military campaign.
At the Osama bin Zaid Boys School north of Gaza City, AFP saw the aftermath of what Hamas authorities said was Israeli tank shelling that killed 20 people.
Ambulance teams rushed into the debris-littered building to aid the wounded and remove the dead.
Stunned onlookers wept and wandered the scene with their hands clasped on their heads in horror and disbelief.
A long row of washing still hung from windows on the building’s first storey, evidence that the school had become a temporary home for some of the hundreds of thousands displaced by the war.
The Israeli army describes Gaza City as “the centre of the Hamas terror organisation” and says it is targeting Hamas militants, weapons stores, tunnel complexes, drone launching posts and command centres there.
Israeli ground forces launched overnight “a targeted raid” in southern Gaza, the military said Saturday, where it has struck before but rarely sent in troops.
The “IDF (Israeli army) armoured and engineering corps operated to map out buildings and neutralise explosive devices,” it said.
“The troops encountered a terrorist cell exiting a tunnel shaft. In response, the troops fired shells toward the terrorists and killed them.”
Israel says it has struck 12,000 targets across the Palestinian territory since October 7, one of the fiercest bombing campaigns in recent memory.
A key focus of his Blinken’s Israel visit on Friday was to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to enact “humanitarian pauses”, which the United States believes could help secure the release of roughly 240 hostages thought to be in Hamas captivity, and to allow aid to be distributed to Gaza’s beleaguered population.
Netanyahu said later, however, that he would not agree to a “temporary truce” with Hamas until the Islamist group releases the hostages.
With AFP
