Fierce combat rages in Khan Yunis; US,UK attack Houthi targets in Yemen
GAZA
The Israeli army said Tuesday that 24 soldiers had been killed in Gaza the day before, the biggest single-day toll since the start of its ground operation on October 27.
Most of the soldiers were killed when rocket-propelled grenade fire hit a tank and a building they were trying to blow up, military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement.
Hagari said several of the troops killed were reservists.
“We worked to find the victims until the last hours,” Hagari said, indicating the difficulty in extracting bodies buried under the rubble. “Our reservists sacrificed what was dearest to them so that we could all live here in complete safety,” he said.
Israel invaded Gaza after Palestinian resistance group Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7 as retaliation for decades of oppression and killed around 1,100 Israeli settlers, as per Tel Aviv’s twice revised estimates.
Israel’s blistering retaliatory offensive against Hamas in Gaza has killed 25,295 people, most of them women, children and adolescents, according to the health ministry.
Combat raged in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, against a backdrop of negotiations aimed at bringing about a pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas in the absence of a long-term peace plan.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said early Tuesday that Israeli forces had targeted its headquarters in Khan Yunis “with artillery shelling on the fourth floor, coinciding with intense gunfire from Israeli drones, resulting in injuries among internally displaced individuals who sought safety on our premises”.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA reported that “ground operations, fighting and attacks intensified” over the preceding day around the main southern city, with the Israeli army saying its forces had conducted multiple raids and taken control of Hamas command centres there.
The fierce fighting came as a White House official was due in the region for talks aimed at securing more captive releases, and as US media reported a new Israeli proposal for a deal that would involve a two-month pause in fighting.
UN agencies and aid groups have sounded the alarm about the growing threat of disease and famine in Gaza, where 1.7 million people are estimated to have been displaced from their homes.
Abu Iyad, his belongings piled on a donkey-drawn cart, told AFP on Monday that he was moving for the seventh time, fleeing Khan Yunis for Rafah on the Egyptian border, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have settled, many in makeshift tents.
“I’m heading to the unknown,” he said. “They told us to go to Rafah — where to go in Rafah? Is there any space left?”
Relatives of the captives stormed a parliamentary committee meeting on Monday demanding urgent action.
“You sit here while our children are dying over there,” yelled Gilad Korngold, father of hostage Tal Shoham, an AFP correspondent reported.
US news outlet Axios reported on Monday night that Israel had proposed to Hamas, via Qatari and Egyptian mediators, a new deal to free all the captives. The report, citing unnamed Israeli officials, said the proposed deal would be carried out in multiple stages, and would also involve the release of an undetermined number of Palestinian prisoners.
