Israel pressed its blistering assault in the Gaza Strip on Saturday as fears grew of a push into Rafah, the southern city teeming with civilians uprooted by the nearly four-month war.
A constant barrage of air strikes and tank fire rocked Khan Yunes during the night, an AFP journalist said of the main city in southern Gaza that has been the focus of the Israeli offensive.
The health ministry in Gaza said more than 100 people were killed across the Palestinian territory overnight, mostly women and children. The Israeli Army said its forces killed “dozens of terrorists” in northern and central Gaza over the past 24 hours.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the fierce fighting have fled south to Rafah since the outbreak of the war, with their tents cramming spaces along streets and in parks.
The city that had been home to 200,000 people now hosts more than half of Gaza’s 2.4 million population, the World Health Organization said on Friday.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to the Middle East yet again in the coming days to press a new proposal involving the release of Israeli hostages in return for a pause in the fighting, the State Department said.
Blinken will visit Qatar and Egypt — the mediators of the proposal — as well as Israel, the occupied West Bank, and Saudi Arabia starting Sunday, it added.
The trip — his fifth since the war broke out — comes after Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, said there were hopes of “good news” about a fresh pause to the fighting “in the next couple of weeks.”
Ansari said a truce proposal thrashed out in Paris had “been approved by the Israeli side” and received a “positive” initial response from Hamas as well.
However, a source close to Hamas told AFP, “There is no agreement on the framework of the agreement yet; the factions have important observations, and the Qatari statement is rushed and untrue.”
With AFP
