Heavy fighting and bombardment continued in Gaza City’s Shuja’iya district for a fourth day on Sunday, months after the Israeli military announced the dismantling of Hamas’ command structure in the northern region.
Thousands of Palestinians have fled the devastated area, where the army said it fought Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants “above and below ground” in tunnels.
The army said troops had “killed several terrorists, recovered weapons and carried out targeted raids on bomb-laden combat complexes” in the past 24 hours, while the air force “strike[ed]dozens of militant infrastructure” of the militants.
Clashes were also reported in central Gaza and the southern Rafah region, a week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the “acute phase” of the war that had been going on since October 7 was coming to an end.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimated that “60,000 to 80,000 people have been displaced since fighting resumed in Shuja’iyya on Thursday and the army issued evacuation orders.”
Months of talks on a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages have produced little progress, with Hamas saying on Saturday there was “nothing new” in a revised plan presented by US mediators.
United States President Joe Biden late last month outlined an Israeli plan for a six-week ceasefire and the exchange of some hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
According to US news site Axios, Washington submitted “new language” for parts of the proposed agreement last week.
Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official in Lebanon, confirmed the Islamist movement had received the latest proposal, but said it had led to “no real progress in the negotiations to stop the aggression.”
Hamdan labelled the proposals a “waste of time” aimed at “giving the occupier (Israel) extra time to commit genocide”.
‘Everything is ruined’
The war began with a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,195 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli data.
Hamas has also seized 251 hostages, 116 of them in Gaza itself, although the military says 42 are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory strikes have killed at least 37,877 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
Doctors at Nasser Hospital, where the bodies were taken, said six more people were killed in a dawn air strike targeting a family’s home in Rafah.
Eyewitnesses said that artillery shelling also took place in the southern areas of Rafah city.
The United Nations and other relief agencies have expressed concern about the dire humanitarian crisis and the risk of starvation for Gaza’s 2.4 million people caused by the war and Israeli siege.
“It’s literally unbearable,” Louise Wateridge of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees, said on Friday after returning to the town of Khan Younis.
“Everything is destroyed,” he said. “And yet people are living there again… There’s no water, no sanitation, no food. And now, people are living again in these buildings that are empty shells.”
In Israel, thousands of protesters again took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday night demanding more efforts to return the remaining detainees and early elections.
Former hostage Noa Arghamani, 26, who was rescued in a special forces raid on 8 June, said in a video address that “we cannot forget the hostages who are still in Hamas captivity, and we must do everything possible to bring them back home”.
‘A devastating war’
The Gaza conflict has also raised tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where the army has exchanged cross-border fire with the Hezbollah movement since October.
Hezbollah is part of an “axis of resistance” of Iran-backed armed groups fighting Israel and its Western allies. The group also includes activists from Iraq and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
This month the Israeli military said its plan to invade Lebanon had been “approved and validated”, prompting Hezbollah to respond that no part of Israel would be abandoned in a full-blown conflict.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations said on social media on Saturday that it “regards the Zionist regime’s propaganda about its intention to attack Lebanon as psychological warfare.”
It also warned its arch enemy that, “if he launches a full-scale military invasion, a devastating war will begin”.
“All options, including the full involvement of all resistance fronts, are under consideration.”
Iran, which backs Hamas, has described the October 7 attack as a success but has denied involvement.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)