Gaza: nearly 26 dead the day after the resumption of negotiations

(Keystone-ATS) Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened on Wednesday to further intensify strikes on Gaza if the Palestinian Islamist movement continued to fire rockets into his country.

Since then, projectiles have been fired almost daily from Palestinian territory, and Israel continues its raids while Hamas announced Friday that talks on a truce were resuming in Doha.

The Hamas government’s Health Ministry in Gaza reported 136 deaths in the past 48 hours. Figures deemed reliable by the UN, significantly higher than those communicated in recent weeks.

Gazan emergency services announced that at least 26 people were killed on Saturday in several Israeli strikes across the coastal strip.

One of them, according to the same source, completely destroyed the house of the al-Ghoul family in Gaza City in the early morning, killing 11 people, including seven children and a woman.

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army did not immediately comment.

“Everything shook”

“A big explosion woke us up, everything shook. I was surprised to see that it was the house of our neighbors, the al-Ghoul family. It was inhabited by children and women. There was no one wanted or who represented a danger,” testifies Ahmed Moussa.

AFP images in the Choujaiya district show residents searching through still smoking rubble and bodies lined up on the ground, wrapped in white sheets.

Gaza Civil Defense also indicated that five security agents, responsible for escorting humanitarian convoys, were killed by an Israeli strike while they were driving in Khan Younes, in the south of the Palestinian territory.

Its spokesperson, Mahmoud Bassal, accused the Israeli army of having “deliberately targeted” them in order to “affect the humanitarian chain and increase the suffering” of the population of the Gaza Strip, plunged into a very serious humanitarian crisis. .

Local emergency services also reported the deaths of ten other people in strikes throughout the territory, both in the north, center and south.

Negotiations in Doha

It is in this context that indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel resumed on Friday in Doha.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized his country’s negotiators on Thursday to continue discussions in Qatar with a view to an agreement for the release of hostages held in Gaza since the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023.

The Palestinian movement announced on Friday that this new round of discussions would notably focus on a “complete cessation of hostilities” and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

Israel did not immediately comment on Hamas’ announcement of a resumption of negotiations.

Despite intense diplomatic efforts led under the aegis of Qatar, Egypt and the United States, no truce has been concluded since the one-week truce at the end of November 2023.

Discussions, already organized in Doha, had revived hopes in December of a ceasefire, associated with a release of hostages, but Hamas and Israel had accused each other of stopping them.

Tens of thousands killed

The war in Gaza was triggered by an unprecedented attack by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures and including hostages who died or were killed in captivity in Gaza.

At least 45,717 people, mainly civilians, were killed in the Israeli military campaign of retaliation in Gaza, according to the latest report on Saturday from the Hamas Ministry of Health.