Palestinians inspect a school sheltering displaced people following an Israeli strike, amid Israel-Hamas conflict, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on July 27, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli airstrikes hit a school and a hospital in central Gaza on Saturday as the country’s negotiators prepared to meet international mediators to discuss a proposed cease-fire.

At least 30 people sheltering at a girls’ school in Deir Al-Balah were taken to Al Aqsa Hospital and pronounced dead after a strike that Israel’s military said targeted a Hamas command and control centre used to store weapons and plan attacks.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said 11 people were killed in other strikes on Saturday.

Israel’s military ordered the evacuation of a part of a designated humanitarian zone in Gaza ahead of a planned strike on Khan Younis on Saturday, as the country’s negotiators prepare to meet international mediators to discuss a proposed cease-fire.

The evacuation order is in response to rocket fire that Israel said originated from the area. The military said it planned an operation against Hamas militants in the city, including parts of Muwasi, the crowded tent camp in an area where Israel has told thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge throughout the war.

The planned strike comes a day before officials from the US, Egypt, Qatar and Israel are scheduled to meet in Italy and discuss the ongoing hostage and cease-fire negotiations. CIA Director Bill Burns is expected to meet Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani, Mossad director David Barnea and Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel on Sunday, according to officials from the U.S. and Egypt who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to discuss the plans.

It’s the second evacuation order issued in a week that has included striking part of the humanitarian zone, a 60-square-kilometer (roughly 20-square-mile) blanketed with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities and have limited access to aid, United Nations and humanitarian groups say. Israel expanded the zone in May to take in people fleeing Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population at the time had crowded.

According to Israeli estimates, about 1.8 million Palestinians are currently sheltering there after being uprooted multiple times in search of safety during Israel’s punishing air and ground campaign. In November, the military said the area could still be struck and that it was “not a safe zone, but it is a safer place than any other” in Gaza.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said it was increasingly difficult to know how many people would be affected by the evacuation order because those sheltering under there were constantly being displaced.

“Referring to the orders as evacuation orders don’t do any justice to what this means,” said Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications.“These are forced displacement orders. What happens is when people have these orders, they have very little time to move.”

Further north, Palestinians mourned the deaths of seven killed by Israeli airstrikes overnight on Zawaida, in central Gaza. Members of two families — parents and their two children as well as a mother and her two children — were wrapped in traditional Islamic white burial shrouds as community members gathered to perform funeral rights. As men lined up to pray in front of the bodies, weeping friends and neighbours approached individually to pay their final respects.

Deir al-Balah’s Al Aqsa hospital confirmed the count and Associated Press journalists saw the bodies.

The war in Gaza has killed more than 39,100 Palestinians, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count. The UN estimated in February that some 17,000 children in the territory are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.

The war began with an assault by Hamas militants on southern Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. About 115 are still in Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead, according to Israeli authorities.

People search the rubble of a collapsed building in the aftermath of Israeli bombardment at the Jaouni school run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on July 6, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Hamas authorities in Gaza said an Israeli strike on Saturday on a UN-run school where thousands of displaced were sheltering killed 16 people.

Israel’s military said its aircraft had targeted “terrorists” operating around the Al-Jawni school in Nuseirat, central Gaza.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, which condemned the strike as an “odious massacre”, said 50 injured were taken to hospital from the school.

Some 7,000 people were sheltering in the school at the time of the attack, the Hamas government press office said. Dozens of people scrambled through the rubble after the strike to find survivors.

The press office said the school was run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, and most of the casualties were “children, women, and elderly”.

“This is the fourth time they have targeted the school without warning,” said one woman, Samah Abu Amsha, who told how some children were killed as they read the Koran in a class when the missile hit.

Also read | Israeli strikes in Rafah: At least 37 Palestinians, most in tents, killed

“Shrapnel flew at me inside the classroom and the children were injured,” she told AFP.

Hamas called the attack “a new massacre and crime committed by this criminal enemy as part of its war of genocide against our Palestinian people”.

The Israeli military said in a statement it “struck several terrorists operating in structures located in the area of UNRWA’s Al-Jawni school”.

“This location served as a hideout and operational infrastructure from which attacks against IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip were directed and carried out,” it added, insisting that “steps were taken in order to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”.

‘No place is safe’

Israel has agreed to meetings with mediators on a ceasefire initiative but has kept up its offensive in the territory that started on October 7 after the Hamas attack on southern Israel.

UNRWA said two of its workers were killed in a strike at Al-Bureij, also in central Gaza, early Saturday. The agency has a major food warehouse in the district.

The Al-Aqsa hospital said nine other bodies were brought to its morgue from the strike.

The UN agency said 194 of its workers have now been killed since the war started.

An UNRWA spokesperson said that since the war began, more than half of the agency’s facilities have been hit and many were shelters. “As a result at least 500 people sheltering in those facilities have been killed,” the spokesperson told AFP.

Paramedics said 10 people, including three journalists, died in another strike on a house in Nuseirat on Saturday.

“Absolutely no place in the Gaza Strip is safe,” said civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal.

The war began with the October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

Hamas militants also seized hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the military says are dead.

In response, Israel has carried out a military offensive that has killed at least 38,098 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run health ministry there.

Palestinians walk near houses destroyed in the Israeli military offensive as they struggle with food scarcity, basic necessities amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, in Jabalia refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip, on June 19, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will on July 4 evening convene a meeting of his security cabinet to discuss proposals from Hamas about a possible ceasefire deal in Gaza, a source in Netanyahu’s office said.

Before the cabinet meets, Mr. Netanyahu will have consultations with his ceasefire negotiations team, the source also said.

Jerusalem:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that a deadly strike that hit a displacement camp in Gaza’s Rafah was a “tragic accident” which his government was investigating.

“In Rafah, we evacuated a million uninvolved residents and, despite our best efforts, a tragic accident happened yesterday,” Netanyahu told parliament.

He added that “we are investigating the case and will draw the conclusions” after Gaza’s health ministry reported 45 dead as the strike late Sunday sparked a fire that tore through a tent city for displaced Gazans.

The ministry in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip also said that 249 people were wounded.

Israel faced a wave of international condemnation on Monday over the Rafah strike, including from across the region as well from the European Union, France and the United Nations.

The Israeli military said it had launched a probe into the strike which it said was carried out based on “precise intelligence information” about two Hamas militants who it said were killed.

It also said “the strike did not occur in the humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi, to which the IDF (army) has encouraged civilians to evacuate” since the ground operation began in Rafah.

Netanyahu struck a defiant tone in his Knesset address while being heckled by relatives of hostages held in Gaza, and vowed to keep up the battle to destroy Hamas.

“There is no substitute for absolute victory” in Gaza, he told the chamber.

Netanyahu denounced pressure, both internal and external, that he said his government has faced since the war in Gaza began.

“They pressured us then,” said Netanyahu, before listing calls to refrain from military operations which Israel carried out anyway.

“Don’t enter Gaza. We entered! Do not enter Shifa! We entered! Do not enter Khan Yunis! We entered! Do not enter Rafah! We entered!” he said.

“I don’t give up and I won’t give up! I stand up to pressures from home and abroad.”

The Gaza war broke out after the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 36,050 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes in Gaza City on October 28, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned on October 28 there was the potential for thousands more civilians to die if Israel presses a major ground offensive in Gaza.

Israel’s army relentlessly hammered the territory on October 28 after fierce overnight bombardment that rescuers said destroyed hundreds of buildings three weeks into a war sparked by the deadliest attack in the country’s history.

“Given the manner in which military operations have been conducted until now, in the context of the 56-year-old occupation, I am raising alarm about the possibly catastrophic consequences of large-scale ground operations in Gaza and the potential for thousands more civilians to die,” Turk said.

“There is no safe place in Gaza and there is no way out. I am very worried for my colleagues, as I am for all civilians in Gaza.”

Follow live updates from the Israel-Hamas war on October 28

Israel unleashed its bombing campaign after Hamas gunmen stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and seizing more than 220 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

The Health Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza said Israeli strikes had killed 7,703 people, mainly civilians, including more than 3,500 children.

The U.N. rights chief also condemned the Internet and telecommunications blackout that has hit the Palestinian enclave since Friday.

“Compounding the misery and suffering of civilians, Israeli strikes on telecommunications installations and subsequent Internet shutdown have effectively left Gazans with no way of knowing what is happening across Gaza and cut them off from the outside world,” he said.

“Ambulances and civil defence teams are no longer able to locate the injured, or the thousands of people estimated to be still under the rubble.

“When these hostilities end, those who have survived will face the rubble of their homes and the graves of their family members,” Turk said.

He called on all parties “to do all in their power to de-escalate the conflict”.

The conflict is the fifth and deadliest in Gaza since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Palestinian territory in 2005.

The latest Israeli strikes against Hamas, the Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, were the most intense since the war broke out. They coincided with ground operations.

“Continued violence is not the answer. I call on all parties as well as third States, in particular those with influence over the parties to the conflict, to do all in their power to de-escalate this conflict,” Turk added.

Scores of Palestinians were killed in central Gaza on Sunday after Israel stepped up its strikes on the war-torn enclave and another convoy of 17 aid trucks arrived as the Hamas-run territory faces “catastrophic” shortages.

With the violence raging unchecked, Iran said the region could spiral “out of control”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a stark warning to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, saying getting involved would be “the mistake of its life”.

Washington warned any actors looking to inflame the conflict that it would not hesitate to act in the event of any “escalation”.

Hamas militants in Gaza stormed across the border into Israel on October 7, launching a raid that killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians who were shot, mutilated or burnt to death on the first day, according to Israeli officials.

They also seized more than 200 hostages in the worst-ever attack in Israel’s history.

Israel has hit back with a relentless bombing campaign which has so far killed more than 4,600 Palestinians, mainly civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Officials said the central town of Deir al-Balah had been particularly badly hit overnight Saturday to Sunday.

The Ministry said at least 80 people had been killed in the overnight raids on central Gaza, which destroyed more than 30 homes.

At the hospital morgue, an AFP journalist saw the bodies of many children on the bloodied floor, where distraught families wept as they identified the victims.

Among them was a man clutching his dead toddler and a young boy who pulled back a blanket over his little sister’s body.

“My cousin was sleeping in his house with his daughter in his arms. He was a man with no record, nothing to do with the resistance,” said Wael Wafi, gazing at the body of his cousin, his arm still wrapped around his three-year-old daughter Misk.

Also Sunday, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that 29 of its staff had been killed since the start of the war in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, saying half of them were teachers. On Saturday it had given a toll of 17.

The scale of the bombing has left basic systems unable to function. The UN saying dozens of unidentified bodies had been buried in a mass grave in Gaza City because cold storage had run out.

Meanwhile, an Israeli soldier was killed near the Gaza border by an anti-tank missile fired by militants inside the enclave, the army said.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned the war with Hamas could take months.

“It will take one month, two months, three months, and at the end there will be no more Hamas,” Mr. Gallant said.

A second convoy of 17 trucks of aid entered Gaza from Egypt on Sunday following an initial delivery of 20 trucks on Saturday after intensive negotiations and U.S. pressure.

Separately, an AFP journalist saw six trucks leaving Rafah after filling up from dwindling fuel stocks held at the crossing as the enclave faces catastrophic shortages after Israel cut off supplies of food, water, fuel and electricity.

It later resumed water supplies to the south on October 15.

Although Egyptian media said another 40 trucks would enter Gaza on Monday, the UN says the enclave needs 100 trucks per day to meet the needs of Gaza’s 2.4 million residents.

And so far, there have been no deliveries of fuel, with UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini warning Sunday that supplies would run out “in three days”.

“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and.. aid will not reach many civilians in desperate need,” he said.

The Hamas government said 165,000 housing units — half of those in the entire Gaza Strip — had been destroyed in the raids.

With fears growing that the conflict could spread, Israel on Sunday admitted accidentally hitting an Egyptian border post, apologising for the incident which Cairo said had left an unspecified number of border guards with “minor injuries”.

There were fresh exchanges of fire over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon as fears grew that Hezbollah, a close ally of Hamas and Iran, could enter the conflict, prompting Israel’s Netanyahu to warn it would be “the mistake of its life”.

“We will strike it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the significance for it and the state of Lebanon will be devastating,” he said.

Iran also warned about the conflict spreading on Sunday, with top diplomat Hossein Amir-Abdollahian cautioning that if Washington and Israel did not “immediately stop the crime against humanity and genocide in Gaza.. the region will go out of control”.

But Washington said it wouldn’t hesitate to act in the event of any “escalation”, just hours after the Pentagon moved to step up military readiness in the region.

“If any group or any country is looking to widen this conflict and take advantage of this very unfortunate situation that we see, our advice is: don’t,” U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said on ABC News.

On Sunday, Pope Francis used his weekly Angelus prayer in Rome to plead for an end to the bloodshed.

“War is always a defeat, it is a destruction of human fraternity. Brothers, stop!” he said.

He later held a 20-minute conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden about “conflict situations in the world and the need to identify paths to peace”, the Vatican said.

Mr. Biden later discussed with war with the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy, the White House said.

The U.S. President also held talks with Mr. Netanyahu, said the White House, adding: “The leaders affirmed that there will now be continued flow of this critical assistance into Gaza.”

In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron’s office announced he would be travelling to Israel on Tuesday for talks with Mr. Netanyahu.

Protesters marched in several European capitals on Sunday.

At least 10,000 people rallied in support of Israel in Berlin as Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to stamp out a resurgence of anti-Semitic incidents linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

And thousands gathered in Paris to demand an end to Israel’s operation in Gaza, the first pro-Palestinian rally in the French capital that wasn’t banned on security grounds.