[🇧🇩] Israel and Hamas war in Gaza-----Can Bangladesh be a peace broker?

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 37 in Gaza

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Friday that 37 people had been killed in the Palestinian territory in the past 24 hours, taking the overall war death toll to 45,436.

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Israeli strikes kill 37 in Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Palestinian Territories 28 December, 2024, 00:14

Civilians check the site of an Israeli strike in Jabalia, in the central Gaza Strip, on Friday, amid the on-going war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. | AFP photo

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Friday that 37 people had been killed in the Palestinian territory in the past 24 hours, taking the overall war death toll to 45,436.

The ministry also said in a statement that at least 1,08,038 people had been wounded in more than 14 months of war between Israel and Hamas, triggered by the Palestinian group’s October 7, 2023 attack.

The Israeli military reported launching an operation on Friday targeting Hamas militants near one of northern Gaza’s last functioning hospitals, while Hamas accused it of storming the facility and evacuating those inside.

The operation, centred near the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, followed an announcement from the hospital on Thursday that five of its staff members were killed in an Israeli strike.

The military claimed in a statement that the hospital had become ‘a key stronghold for terrorist organisations and continues to be used as a hideout for terrorist operatives’ since Israeli forces began broader operations in northern Gaza in October.

Acting on intelligence regarding ‘terrorist infrastructure and operatives’ in the hospital’s vicinity, the military said it began operations there on Friday.

‘The troops are conducting targeted operations in the area, while mitigating harm to uninvolved civilians, patients, and medical personnel,’ it added.

Since October 6, Israel has intensified its land and air offensive in northern Gaza, stating its goal is to prevent Hamas militants from regrouping in the region.

Before initiating the latest operation near the hospital, the military said its troops had ‘facilitated the secure evacuation of civilians, patients, and medical personnel’.

But Hamas said Israeli forces had stormed the facility on Friday.

‘The occupation army stormed Kamal Adwan hospital forcing medical staff, patients, the wounded, and displaced people to evacuate,’ it said in a statement.

Hamas further accused Israeli forces of isolating and detaining those evacuated, saying: ‘Hamas holds the occupation fully responsible for the lives of patients, wounded, and medical staff after they were cut off from communication, arrested and taken to an unknown location.’

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, quoting hospital director Hossam Abu Safiyeh, said that the military had ‘set on fire all surgery departments of the hospital’.

Safiyeh said the military had also ‘evacuated the entire medical staff and displaced people’.

‘There are a large number of injuries among the medical team.’

As of Friday morning, the hospital housed around 350 people, including 75 injured and sick patients, along with 180 medical staff, Safiyeh said.

Witnesses in the area said that the hospital had been evacuated and hundreds of people living in the vicinity were ‘forced to seek refuge at Al-Fakhura school and the Indonesian hospital’ in Jabalia.

AFP was unable to contact Safiyeh and other hospital officials or independently verify how many people had been evacuated from the facility.

The Israeli military has regularly accused Hamas of using hospitals as command and control centres for attacks against its forces throughout the war. Hamas has denied these accusations.

On Thursday, Safiyeh said that five staff members had been killed in an Israeli strike.

In recent days, Safiyeh has repeatedly raised concerns about the hospital’s situation, accusing Israeli forces of targeting the facility.​

 

[Saif]

Gaza hospital shut after Israeli raid, director held: health officials

An Israeli military raid targeting Hamas members has forced a major hospital in northern Gaza out of service and led to the detention of its director, the WHO and health officials said Saturday

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Gaza hospital shut after Israeli raid, director held: health officials

Photo: Collected

An Israeli military raid targeting Hamas members has forced a major hospital in northern Gaza out of service and led to the detention of its director, the WHO and health officials said Saturday.

The assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital has rendered the facility "useless", further worsening Gaza's severe health crisis, the Palestinian territory's health officials said.

The World Health Organisation said the operation had put the "last major health facility in north Gaza out of service".

"Initial reports indicate that some key departments were severely burnt and destroyed during the raid," it added in a statement on X.

The WHO said 60 health workers and 25 patients in critical condition, including some on ventilators, reportedly remained in the hospital.

Patients in moderate to severe condition were forced to evacuate to the destroyed, non-functioning Indonesian Hospital, the UN health agency said, adding it was "deeply concerned for their safety".

Hamas-run Gaza's health ministry reported that Israeli forces had detained Kamal Adwan's director, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, along with several medical staff members.

AFP was unable to independently verify whether Abu Safiyeh had been detained, but multiple attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Abu Safiyeh was held alongside its north Gaza chief, Ahmed Hassan al-Kahlout.

The Israeli military did not comment on the detentions.

One of the Gazans evacuated from the hospital, who asked to be identified only as Mohammad for security reasons, told AFP some evacuees were interrogated about Hamas.

"As we began to exit, the army asked all young men to take off their clothes and walk outside the hospital," said Mohammad, whose brother was a patient there.

"They (soldiers) took tens of young men, as well as physicians and patients, to an unknown place... The young men were interrogated, they were asked about resistance fighters, Hamas and weapons."

Ammar al-Barsh, a resident of Jabalia where the military has focused its assault in recent weeks, said the raid on Kamal Adwan and its environs had left dozens of homes in the area in ruins.

"The situation is catastrophic, there is no medical service, no ambulances and no civil defence in the north," Barsh, 50, told AFP.

The army "continues to raid the Kamal Adwan Hospital and the surrounding houses, and we hear gunfire from Israeli drones and artillery shelling", he added.

- 'Heinous crime' -

In the days leading up to the raid, Abu Safiyeh had repeatedly warned about the hospital's precarious situation, accusing Israeli forces of targeting the facility.

On Monday, he issued a statement accusing Israel of targeting the hospital "with the intent to kill and forcibly displace the people inside".

Since October 6, Israel has intensified its land and air offensive in northern Gaza, saying its goal is to prevent Hamas men from regrouping.

The military said Friday that it was acting on intelligence regarding "terrorist infrastructure and operatives" in the hospital's vicinity.

Before initiating the latest operation near the hospital, the military said its troops had "facilitated the secure evacuation of civilians, patients, and medical personnel".

Hamas has denied claims its operatives were present at the hospital.

"The enemy's lies about the hospital aim to justify the heinous crime committed by the occupation army today, involving the evacuation and burning of all hospital departments as part of a plan for extermination and forced displacement," Hamas said in a statement.

Gaza's health ministry had earlier quoted Abu Safiyeh reporting that the military had "set on fire all surgery departments of the hospital".

"There are a large number of injuries among the medical team."​

 

[Saif]

Gaza healthcare nearing ‘total collapse’ due to Israeli strikes: UN

A United Nations report published Tuesday found that Israeli strikes on and near hospitals in the Gaza Strip had left healthcare in the Palestinian territory on the verge of collapse.

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Gaza healthcare nearing ‘total collapse’ due to Israeli strikes: UN
Agence France-Presse . Geneva 31 December, 2024, 22:33

A Palestinian girl walks back into her tent at a makeshift camp housing displaced Palestinians in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, amid the continuing war between Israel and the militant Hamas group. The majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced, often multiple times, by the war that began with Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. | AFP photo

A United Nations report published Tuesday found that Israeli strikes on and near hospitals in the Gaza Strip had left healthcare in the Palestinian territory on the verge of collapse.

The report by the UN human rights office said such strikes raised grave concerns about Israel’s compliance with international law.

‘Israel’s pattern of deadly attacks on and near hospitals in Gaza, and associated combat, pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse, with catastrophic effect on Palestinians’ access to health and medical care,’ the UN human rights office said in a statement.

Its 23-page report, entitled ‘Attacks on hospitals during the escalation of hostilities in Gaza’, looked at the period from October 7, 2023 to June 30, 2024.

It said that during this time, there were at least 136 strikes on 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics and other civilians and causing significant damage to, if not the complete destruction of, civilian infrastructure.

The report noted that medical personnel and hospitals are specifically protected under international humanitarian law, provided they do not commit, or are not used to commit, acts harmful to the enemy outside their humanitarian function.

It found that Israel’s repeated claims that Gaza hospitals were being improperly used for military purposes by Palestinian groups ‘vague’.

‘Insufficient information has so far been made publicly available to substantiate these allegations, which have remained vague and broad, and in some cases appear contradicted by publicly available information,’ the report said.

UN human rights chief Volker Turk said Gaza hospitals had become a ‘death trap’.

‘As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap,’ he said.

‘The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.’

The Gaza war was triggered by the unprecedented Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

That resulted in 1,208 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 45,500 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.

The report concluded with a call for credible investigations into the incidents detailed, and said they had to be independent given the ‘limitations’ of Israel’s justice system in respect of the conduct of its armed forces.

‘It is essential that there be independent, thorough and transparent investigations of all of these incidents, and full accountability for all violations of international humanitarian and human rights law which have taken place,’ said Turk.

‘All medical workers arbitrarily detained must be immediately released.

‘It must also be a priority for Israel, as the occupying power, to ensure and facilitate access to adequate healthcare for the Palestinian population, and for future recovery and reconstruction efforts to prioritise the restoration of the medical capacity which has been destroyed over the last 14 months of intense conflict.’​

 

[Saif]

Gaza babies die from winter cold

Yahya al-Batran clutched the tiny clothes of his dead newborn son Jumaa, just days after the baby died from the cold in their tent in war-torn Gaza.

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Gaza babies die from winter cold
Say medics, families as Israeli attacks push healthcare ‘to brink of collapse’

Yahya al-Batran clutched the tiny clothes of his dead newborn son Jumaa, just days after the baby died from the cold in their tent in war-torn Gaza.

"We are watching our children die before our eyes," said the 44-year-old. Their baby was one of the seven children who died from the cold within the span of a week, the Hamas-run territory's health ministry said on Monday.

"We fled the bombing from Beit Lahia, only for them to die from the cold here?" said the child's mother Noura al-Batran, referring to their hometown in northern Gaza.

The 38-year-old is still recovering from giving birth prematurely to Jumaa and his surviving twin brother, Ali, who is being treated in an intensive care unit at a hospital in southern Gaza.

Completely destitute and repeatedly displaced by the Israel's offensive in Gaza, the Batran family live in a makeshift tent in Deir el-Balah made of worn-out blankets and fabric.

Like hundreds of others now living in a date palm orchard, they have struggled to keep warm and dry amid heavy rains and temperatures that have dropped as low as eight degrees Celsius.

Displaced Palestinian children walk through a puddle of rain water at a makeshift camp housing displaced Palestinians in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday. Photo: AFP
"We don't have enough blankets or suitable clothing. I saw my baby start to freeze, his skin turned blue and then he died," she cried.

The twins were born prematurely and she said the doctor decided to take the babies out of the incubator despite the family not having access to heating.

On a rain-soaked mat, the father hugged his older children tight with blankets and worn-out cloth in a corner of their tent.

He then placed a small pot of water on the stove to make tea, which he then mixed with dry bread to make a meagre lunch for his family with a little cheese and the thyme-based spice blend called zaatar. Like thousands of other families enduring dire conditions, they face shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, with the United Nations warning of an "imminent collapse" of the healthcare system.

The Hamas government press office in Gaza warned on Monday of the impact of more harsh weather expected in the coming days, saying it posed a "real threat to two million displaced people," the majority of whom live in tents.

In southern Gaza's Khan Yunis, Mahmoud al-Fasih said he found his infant daughter, Seela, "frozen from the cold" in their small tent near al-Mawasi beach, where they were displaced from Gaza City.

He rushed her to the hospital in the area that Israel has designated a "humanitarian zone", but she was already dead. Ahmad Al-Farra, a doctor and director of the emergency and children's department at Nasser Hospital, told AFP that the three-week-old baby arrived at the hospital with "severe hypothermia, without vital signs, in cardiac arrest that led to her death".​

 

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 12 in Gaza

Israeli strikes killed at least 12 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children, officials said on Wednesday, as the nearly 15-month war ground on into the new year with no end in sight...

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Israeli strikes kill 12 in Gaza
United News of Bangladesh/AP . Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip 02 January, 2025, 00:27

Israeli strikes killed at least 12 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children, officials said on Wednesday, as the nearly 15-month war ground on into the new year with no end in sight.

One strike hit a home in the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza, the most isolated and heavily destroyed part of the territory, where Israel has been waging a major operation since early October. Gaza’s health ministry said seven people were killed, including a woman and four children, and at least a dozen other people were wounded.

Another strike overnight in the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza killed a woman and a child, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which received the bodies. The military ordered people to evacuate an area near Bureij overnight, saying it would strike there in response to recent rocket fire by Palestinian militants.

A third strike early Wednesday in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three people, according to the nearby Nasser Hospital and the European Hospital, which received the bodies.

The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and abducting around 250. About 100 hostages are still held in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s air and ground offensive has killed over 45,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. It says women and children make up more than half the fatalities but does not say how many of those killed were militants.

The Israeli military says it only targets militants and blames Hamas for civilian deaths because its fighters operate in dense residential areas. The army says it has killed 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.

The war has caused widespread destruction and displaced some 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, many of them multiple times.

Hundreds of thousands are living in tents on the coast as winter brings frequent rainstorms and temperatures drop below 10 degrees Celsius at night. At least six infants and another person have died of hypothermia, according to the health ministry.

American and Arab mediators have spent nearly a year trying to broker a ceasefire and hostage release, but those efforts have repeatedly stalled. Hamas has demanded a lasting truce, while Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanayhu has vowed to keep fighting until ‘total victory’ over the militants.

More than 82,000 Israelis moved abroad in 2024 and only 33,000 people immigrated to the country, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics said. Another 23,000 Israelis returned after long periods abroad.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people gathered on Istanbul’s Galata Bridge on New Year’s Day to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Demonstrators waved Turkish and Palestinian flags and chanted ‘Free Palestine’ in the protest, organized by the National Will Platform, a coalition of more than 300 pro-Palestinian and Islamic groups.

Bilal Erdogan, the son of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addressed the crowd, urging support for Gaza and condemning Israel’s actions there. He referred to the recent ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad by rebel forces.

‘Muslims in Syria were determined, patient and they achieved victory. After Syria, Gaza will emerge victoriously from the siege,’ he said.

Drone video showed thousands of people filling the bridge and the adjacent Eminönü and Sirkeci districts.

President Erdogan has been a fierce critic of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.​

 

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 26 in Gaza

Rescuers in Gaza said on Saturday that Israeli strikes across the Palestinian territory killed at least 26 people, the day after Hamas militants said peace talks were to resume.

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Israeli strikes kill 26 in Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Palestinian Territories 05 January, 2025, 00:48

A Palestinian boy walks amid the destruction following an Israeli strike that hit the home of the Ghoula family in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City, in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday. | AFP photo

Rescuers in Gaza said on Saturday that Israeli strikes across the Palestinian territory killed at least 26 people, the day after Hamas militants said peace talks were to resume.

The civil defence agency said a dawn air strike on the home of the al-Ghoula family in Gaza City killed 11 people, seven of them children.

AFP images from the Gaza City area neighbourhood of Shujaiya showed residents combing through smoking rubble. Bodies including those of small children were lined up on the ground, shrouded in white sheets.

Late on Friday Hamas had said indirect negotiations with Israel were to resume in Qatar that same night for a truce and hostage release deal. There has since been no update.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the Ghoula home in Gaza City ‘was completely destroyed’.

‘It was a two-storey building and several people are still under the rubble,’ he said, adding Israeli drones had ‘also fired on ambulance staff’.

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

‘A huge explosion woke us up. Everything was shaking,’ said neighbour Ahmed Mussa. ‘It was home to children, women. There wasn’t anyone wanted or who posed a threat.’

Elsewhere, the civil defence agency said an Israeli strike killed five security officers tasked with accompanying aid convoys as they drove through the southern city of Khan Yunis.

Bassal accused Israel of having ‘deliberately targeted’ them to ‘affect the humanitarian supply chain and increase the suffering’ of the population.

The army has not yet responded to the accusation.

Rescuers said strikes elsewhere in Gaza killed 10 other people, including a child and two other members of the same family, when their house was bombed in Khan Yunis.

AFP images showed Palestine Red Crescent paramedics in Gaza City moving the body of one of their colleagues, his green jacket laid over the blanket that covered his corpse.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said 136 people had been killed over the previous 48 hours.​

 

[Saif]

Hamas agrees to free 34 Gaza hostages under mooted deal

A Hamas official said Sunday the group was ready to free 34 hostages in the ‘first phase’ of a potential deal with Israel, after Israel said indirect talks on a truce and hostage release agreement had resumed in Qatar...

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Hamas agrees to free 34 Gaza hostages under mooted deal
Agence France-Presse . Palestine 06 January, 2025, 06:58

A Hamas official said Sunday the group was ready to free 34 hostages in the ‘first phase’ of a potential deal with Israel, after Israel said indirect talks on a truce and hostage release agreement had resumed in Qatar.

Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States have tried for months to strike a deal to end the war. The latest effort comes just days before Donald Trump takes office as president of the United States on January 20.

The talks took place as Israel pounded the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing at least 23 people according to rescuers, nearly 15 months into the war.

During that time there has been only one truce, a one-week pause in November 2023 that saw 80 Israeli hostages freed along with 240 Palestinians from Israeli jails.

Now, ‘Hamas has agreed to release 34 Israeli prisoners from a list presented by Israel as part of the first phase of a prisoner exchange deal,’ said an official of the Palestinian militants.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas had yet to provide a list of hostages for potential release under an agreement.

The Hamas official, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to discuss the ongoing negotiations with the media, said the initial swap would include all the women, children, elderly people and sick captives still held in Gaza.

But Hamas needed time to determine their condition, he added.

‘Hamas has agreed to release the 34 prisoners, whether alive or dead,’ the official said. ‘However, the group needs a week of calm to communicate with the captors and identify those who are alive and those who are dead.’

On October 7, 2023, when the Gaza war began, Hamas activists seized 251 hostages, of whom 96 remained in Gaza. The Israeli military says 34 of those are dead.

Until the Hamas official’s comment there had been no update on the talks, which both warring sides were to resume in Qatar over the weekend.

‘Efforts are under way to free the hostages, notably the Israeli delegation which left yesterday (Friday) for negotiations in Qatar,’ Israeli defence minister Israel Katz told relatives of a hostage on Saturday, according to his office.

In December, Qatar expressed optimism that ‘momentum’ was returning to the talks following Trump’s election victory.

But Hamas and Israel then traded accusations of imposing new conditions and obstacles.

In northern Gaza on Sunday, the civil defence agency said an air strike on a house in the Sheikh Radwan area had killed at least 11 people.

Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the victims included women and children, and rescuers were using their ‘bare hands’ to search for five people still trapped under rubble.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck more than 100 ‘terror targets’ in Gaza over the past two days, marking an apparent escalation in its assault.

The Hamas-run territory’s health ministry said that 88 people had been killed over the previous 24 hours.

In one strike, five people died when the house of the Abu Jarbou family was struck in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, rescuers said.

AFP footage from another strike, on Bureij camp near Nuseirat, showed rescuers transporting bodies and injured people to a hospital.

It showed a medic attempting to resuscitate a wounded man inside an ambulance, while another carried an injured child to the hospital.

Relatives cried over the bodies of two men wrapped in white shrouds, the images showed.

Several of the strikes targeted sites from which militants had been firing projectiles into Israel in recent days, the military said.

The military also announced that its forces had killed a militant commander in close combat in northern Gaza past week.

In the Past week, Katz warned of intensified strikes if the incoming rocket fire continued.

Rocket fire had become less frequent as the war dragged on but has recently intensified, as Israel has pressed a major land and air offensive in the territory’s north since early October.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli data.

Israel’s military offensive killed 45,805 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable, while 1,208 people, mostly civilians, were killed at the beginning of the war, according to official Israeli data.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces had killed a teenager during a raid on a refugee camp near the city of Nablus on Sunday.

Mutaz Ahmad Abdul Wahab Madani, 17, was ‘killed and two others were wounded by occupation forces’ gunfire during a raid near Askar Camp east of Nablus’, said a ministry statement.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment.​

 

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza

Gaza’s civil defence agency reported that Israeli strikes in the Palestinian territory had killed at least 23 people on Sunday, while the military said it had targeted more than ‘100 terror targets’ over the past two days.

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Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Palestinian Territories 06 January, 2025, 00:50

Gaza’s civil defence agency reported that Israeli strikes in the Palestinian territory had killed at least 23 people on Sunday, while the military said it had targeted more than ‘100 terror targets’ over the past two days.

At least 11 people were killed in an air strike on a house in northern Gaza’s Sheikh Radwan area early on Sunday, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said, adding that the dead included women and children.

‘Rescuers are still searching for five people trapped under the rubble of the house,’ he said.

‘Rescuers are using their bare hands because we lack proper equipment.’

Bassal accused Israeli forces of ‘directing violent air strikes on homes where displaced people were sheltering, claiming they were targeting resistance fighters’.

In a separate strike, five people were killed when the house of the Abu Jarbou family was struck in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, the civil defence said.

Another strike killed four people in the town of Jabalia, the agency added.

The Israeli military said Sunday that it had struck more than 100 ‘terror targets’ in the Gaza Strip over the past two days. Several of the strikes targeted sites from which Palestinian militants had been firing projectiles into Israel in recent days, the military said.

‘The IAF (air force) struck over 100 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip, and eliminated dozens of Hamas terrorists’ in the past two days, a military statement said.

Gaza’s civil defence agency reported that on Saturday more than 30 people were killed in Israeli strikes.

Last week, Israeli defence minister Israel Katz warned of intensified Israeli strikes if the incoming rocket fire continued.

The renewed fire from Gaza has triggered air raid sirens in Israeli communities that were largely destroyed during Hamas’s October 2023 attack.

Though less frequent than in the early days of the nearly 15-month-long war, there has been a recent spate of launches by militants in the devastated Palestinian territory.

The latest violence in Gaza comes as indirect negotiations for a hostage release deal and ceasefire had resumed in Qatar.

Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been engaged for months in efforts to strike a deal to end the war and secure the release of dozens of hostages still held in Gaza.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Sunday that 88 people were killed in the Palestinian territory in the past 24 hours, taking the overall death toll of the war to 45,805.

The ministry also said in a statement that at least 1,09,064 people had been wounded in nearly 15 months of war between Israel and Hamas, triggered by the Palestinian group’s October 7, 2023 attack.​

 

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 12 in Gaza

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces pounded the Palestinian territory on Thursday, killing at least 12 people including three girls, 15 months into the war...

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Israeli strikes kill 12 in Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Palestinian Territories 10 January, 2025, 00:30

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces pounded the Palestinian territory on Thursday, killing at least 12 people including three girls, 15 months into the war.

The latest strikes came as Qatar, Egypt, and the United States mediate negotiations in Doha between Israel and Hamas militants for a deal to end the fighting in Gaza and secure the release of hostages.

Three girls and their father were killed when an air strike hit their house in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, the civil defence agency reported.

Local paramedic Mahmud Awad said he helped transfer the bodies of two girls and their father, Mahmud Abu Kharuf to a hospital.

‘Their bodies were found under the rubble of the house that the occupation bombed in the Nuseirat camp,’ Awad said. He added that the body of the third girl had been found earlier by residents.

In a separate strike, eight people were killed when their house was struck in the town of Jabalia in northern Gaza, where the army has focused its offensive since October 6.

Several more were wounded in that strike, the civil defence agency said.

Israeli air strikes and shelling continues across Gaza, even as mediators push on with their efforts to halt the fighting and secure a deal for the release of hostages still held in Gaza.

On Wednesday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in Paris that a ceasefire was ‘very close’.

‘I hope that we can get it over the line in the time that we have,’ Blinken said, referring to president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

But if not, ‘I believe that when we get that deal — and we’ll get it — it’ll be on the basis of the plan that president Joe Biden put before the world back in May.’

In May, Biden unveiled a three-phase plan for the release of the hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza.​

 

[Saif]

Gaza death toll 40% higher than recorded

Says Lancet study; Israeli forces bomb a group of Palestinians in eastern Gaza City

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Gaza death toll 40% higher than recorded
Says Lancet study; Israeli forces bomb a group of Palestinians in eastern Gaza City

Buildings lie in ruin in Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, as seen from southern Israel, January 7, 2025. Photo: Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach

Research published in The Lancet medical journal today estimates that the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of Israeli offensive was around 40 percent higher than recorded by the Palestinian territory's health ministry.

The number of dead in Gaza has become a matter of bitter debate since Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas.

Up to June 30 last year, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza reported a death toll of 37,877 in the offensive.

However, the new peer-reviewed study used data from the ministry, an online survey and social media obituaries to estimate that there were between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza by that time.

Meanwhile, Gaza's rescue service yesterday said in a brief statement on Telegram that the Israeli forces bombed a group of Palestinians near the Shujayea roundabout in the east of Gaza City, reports Al Jazeera online.

The study's best death toll estimate was 64,260, which would mean the health ministry had under-reported the number of deaths to that point by 41 percent.

That toll represented 2.9 percent of Gaza's pre-war population, "or approximately one in 35 inhabitants," the study said.

The UK-led group of researchers estimated that 59 percent of the deaths were women, children and the elderly.

The toll was only for deaths from traumatic injuries, so did not include deaths from a lack of health care or food, or the thousands of missing believed to be buried under rubble, reports AFP.

On Thursday, Gaza's health ministry said that 46,006 people had died over the full 15 months of offensive.

Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the Gaza health ministry's figures, but the United Nations have said they are reliable.

The researchers used a statistical method called "capture–recapture" that has previously been used to estimate the death toll in conflicts around the world.

The analysis used data from three different lists, the first provided by the Gaza health ministry of the bodies identified in hospitals or morgues.

The second list was from an online survey launched by the health ministry in which Palestinians reported the deaths of relatives.

The third was sourced from obituaries posted on social media platforms such as X, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, when the identity of the deceased could be verified.

"We only kept in the analysis those who were confirmed dead by their relatives or confirmed dead by the morgues and the hospital," lead study author Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP.

The researchers scoured the lists, searching for duplicates.​