Middle East crisis live: Israel and Hamas wrangle over potential ceasefire and hostage deal
Disagreements over deal continue as Palestinian officials say more than 100 people died over the weekend due to Israeli bombardments
- ‘This is basically a civil war’: West Bank in fear after shooting of journalist
- Social order in Gaza will collapse if Israel ends cooperation with UN aid agency, official says
Israel and Hamas are wrangling over the details of a potential deal to halt Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and return hostages home, as Palestinian officials said intensified Israeli bombardments had killed more than 100 people over the weekend.
A Hamas official said the group had approved a list of 34 Israeli hostages to be returned as part of a deal that could eventually lead to a ceasefire, Reuters reported. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office swiftly issued a statement on Sunday saying Hamas had not provided such a list.
Israeli military airstrikes continued throughout the Gaza Strip on Sunday, with an airstrike killing five people in a house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza and another killing four in Jabalia in the territory’s north, Gaza health officials said. Later in the day, an airstrike hit a police station in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing five people, medics said. It was not immediately clear if all the people who were killed were police officers. At nightfall, medics said an Israeli airstrike had killed three people in Bureij camp in central Gaza, bringing Sunday’s death toll to 17.
Two Palestinians, including a 17-year-old boy, were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, according to the Palestinian Fatah party and the Palestinian health ministry. Palestinian media said Israeli forces opened fire on the home of a 37-year-old man in a town south of Jenin. The health ministry said the 17-year-old was killed in an Israeli raid in Askar camp in Nablus. The Israeli military said its forces killed an armed militant in the West Bank, confiscated weapons and dismantled an explosives manufacturing laboratory. Separately, it said it was looking into reports that a 17-year-old was killed.
Social order in Gaza is likely to collapse further if Israel goes ahead with its threat this month to end all cooperation with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians (Unrwa), Louise Wateridge, its senior emergency officer, has warned.
Gunmen opened fire on vehicles, including a passenger bus, on Monday near a village in the occupied West Bank, killing three people and injuring at least seven others, the Israeli military and emergency services said. “Paramedics have confirmed the deaths of three victims, including two women and a man,” emergency service provider Magen David Adom said, while the military reported that troops were “pursuing the terrorists” who carried out the attack near the village of Al-Funduq.
Antony Blinken will meet his European counterparts Thursday in Rome on Syria, as the west looks to engage the new Islamist-led leadership. Blinken would “meet with European counterparts to advocate for a peaceful, inclusive, Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition”, a state department statement said as he visited Seoul on Monday.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike last year while inside the militant group’s war operations room, according to new details on Sunday disclosed by a senior Hezbollah security official, the Associated Press reports. “His eminence [Nasrallah] used to lead the battle and war from this location,” Wafiq Safa told a news conference on Sunday near the site where Nasrallah was killed. A series of Israeli airstrikes flattened several buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs on 27 September last year, killing Nasrallah.
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