More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed in the nearly two-year war in the Gaza Strip, local health officials said Thursday, as Hamas and Israel reiterated their incompatible demands for ending the fighting sparked by the militant group’s 2023 attack.
Israeli strikes killed 28 people, mostly women and children, overnight and into Thursday, according to hospitals, as Israel pressed ahead with its offensive in famine-stricken Gaza City. Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the military spokesman, said Israeli forces control 40% of the city and that the operation would expand "in the coming days.”
In the occupied West Bank, Israelis established a new settlement in a Palestinian city, according to an anti-settlement monitoring group.
The latest strikes came as Israeli troops were operating in parts of Gaza City with plans to take over all of it. The most populous Palestinian city is home to around a million people many of whom have already been displaced multiple times.
Shifa Hospital in Gaza City received 25 bodies, including nine children and six women, after Israeli strikes hit tents housing displaced people, according to hospital records. Among those killed was a 10-day-old baby. Another three people were killed in southern Gaza, according to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Maha Afana said the strikes woke her up in the middle of the night as she slept in a tent in Gaza City with her children. When she checked on them she found the bodies of her son and daughter, drenched with blood. “I started screaming,” she said.
Associated Press footage of the aftermath showed charred tents and debris. The sound of further Israeli bombardment echoed in the background.
“What did those children do to the state of Israel? They didn’t carry a knife or artillery. They were just sleeping,” said Hayam Basous, who lost a relative in the strike.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which says it only targets militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. It blames civilian deaths on Hamas, saying militants are entrenched in densely-populated areas.
Death toll rises
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that 64,231 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war. The latest update includes around 400 who were presumed missing but whose deaths it says have been confirmed.
The ministry doesn't say how many of those killed in the war were militants or civilians. It says women and children make up around half the dead.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. Its figures are seen as a reliable estimate of wartime deaths by U.N. agencies and many independent experts. Israel has disputed them without providing its own toll.
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people in their attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Most have since been released in ceasefires or other agreements.
No visible progress in ceasefire efforts
Hamas released a statement late Wednesday saying that it was open to returning all 48 hostages it still holds — around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive — in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, a lasting ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all of Gaza, the opening of border crossings and a start to the daunting challenge of rebuilding Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office dismissed the offer as “spin” and said that the war would continue until all the hostages are returned, Hamas is disarmed and Israel has full security control of the territory, with civilian administration delegated to others.
Talks on a temporary ceasefire that would have seen some of the hostages returned broke down last month when U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff walked away, blaming Hamas. The militant group later accepted a proposal that Hamas and Arab mediators said was almost identical to an earlier one accepted by Israel, but there’s been no public indication that talks have resumed.
Israel and the U.S. have recently hinted at pursuing a comprehensive deal in which all the remaining hostages would be released at once.
New settlement in West Bank city
An anti-settlement watchdog group said Israelis have established a new settlement in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron, in the occupied West Bank.
Peace Now says the government-backed settlers took over a building on a main thoroughfare used by Palestinians to access the Old City, where hundreds of hardline settlers already live in a decades-old settlement guarded by Israeli troops adjacent to Palestinian homes.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli government.
Hebron’s Old City is home to a major holy site revered by Jews and Muslims, where the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their wives, are believed to be buried. It has often been the scene of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for a future state and – along with most of the international community – view settlements as illegal and an obstacle to peace.
“The goal of establishing a settlement in the heart of Hebron’s casbah is to seize new areas of the city and displace Palestinians from them, similar to what was done in the city center around the existing settlements,” Peace Now said.
“The settlement in Hebron is the ugliest face of Israeli control in the territories. Nowhere else in the West Bank is apartheid so blatant,” it said.