Israel Presses Onslaught in Gaza’s Khan Younis as US Pursues Ceasefire Quest

An Israeli air strike on an apartment in southern Gaza killed six people on Tuesday, Palestinian health officials said, as the top US diplomat arrived in Egypt to pursue a quest for a truce deal in the shattering four-month-old war.

Israel said its forces had killed dozens of Palestinian gunmen throughout Gaza in the past 24 hours with fighting focused on Khan Younis in the south and a threatened assault looming on a nearby border town teeming with displaced people.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed for meetings in Cairo after a stop on Monday in Saudi Arabia during his latest trouble-shooting Middle East swing Palestinians hope will clinch a truce before Israeli forces storm Gaza's southern fringes where over a million of Gaza's people are sheltering.

It was Blinken's fifth trip to the region since Hamas militants' lightning attack on Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7 triggered the war, and his first visit since Washington brokered an offer, with Israeli input, for the first extended ceasefire of the conflict, which Hamas says it is still weighing.

Blinken departed Riyadh just after sunrise for a marathon day of talks in Egypt and Qatar before he flies on to Israel.

Washington seeks a deal to secure the release of remaining hostages among those Hamas kidnapped in its Oct. 7 assault as key to making headway on broader challenges such as the governance of post-war Gaza.

The ceasefire offer, delivered to Hamas last week by Qatari and Egyptian mediators, awaits a reply from militants who say they want more guarantees it will stop Israel's blitz on Gaza, against Israeli vows to keep fighting until Hamas is wiped out.

Washington also aims to prevent further escalation elsewhere in the Middle East, after days of US airstrikes on armed proxies of Iran, a major backer of Hamas, and further attacks on Red Sea shipping by Yemen's Tehran-aligned Houthi militias.

In an update on Tuesday, Gaza's Health Ministry said at least 27,585 Palestinians had been confirmed killed in Israel's ground and aerial blitz with thousands more feared buried under vast tracts of rubble across the densely populated enclave. Some 107 had been killed in the past 24 hours, the ministry said.

Israel says 226 of its soldiers have been killed in its offensive, launched after militants from Hamas-ruled Gaza burst through the border fence and killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostages in a rampage through nearby Israeli communities.

ISRAELI FIREPOWER FOCUSED ON KHAN YOUNIS

Israeli forces on Tuesday kept up the pressure on Khan Younis, the focus of its offensive for weeks, bombarding targets from the ground and air again overnight, causing many more deaths and injuries including the six dead from the air strike on the apartment, Palestinian residents and medics told Reuters.

They said Israeli tanks and aircraft continued to pound and besiege areas around Khan Younis's two main hospitals - Nasser and Al-Amal. Israel's military says Hamas militants use hospital premises for cover, which Gaza's rulers Hamas deny.

Rafah, Palestinians' last southern refuge from Israeli advances towards the border with Egypt, was battered by several Israeli air strikes and tank shelling overnight with medics reporting at least several wounded among the many displaced.

At makeshift tent camps in Rafah, untreated sewage flooded towards a shelter for the displaced, the latest sign of Gaza's sanitation system collapsing, raising the specter of disease.

Clothes flapped outside tents made from sheets of thin plastic. Hanan Abu Gabal cooked for her family in a pot over a small fire in the sand.

"We fled for our lives right in the middle of the battle. A rocket was thrown in the school and we barely made it out alive," she said. "We were forcefully displaced from Khan Younis; they followed us. And now we've been forcefully displaced to Rafah, but where else are we meant to go?"

In Gaza City in the north of the narrow coastal enclave, residents reported further Israeli air strikes and tank shelling. Fighting has resurged in Gaza City two months after Israel said it had subdued the area.

In parts of urban north Gaza, displaced people venturing back to check the fate of their homes after some Israeli tanks pulled back told Reuters they were shocked to find few buildings still standing, with rows of multi-floor apartment blocks razed and roads flipped upside down by Israeli bulldozers and bombs.

TRUCE PROPOSAL, WIDER AMBITIONS

During his trouble-shooting Middle East swing, Blinken also aims to win backing for US plans for what would follow a Gaza truce: rebuilding and running the tiny territory, and ultimately for a Palestinian state - which Israel now rules out.

The ceasefire proposal, as described by sources close to the talks, envisages a truce of at least 40 days when militants would free civilians among remaining hostages they are holding, followed by later phases to hand over soldiers and bodies, in exchange for releases of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

The only truce so far lasted a week in November.

The Gaza war has escalated violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinians also seek statehood.

On Monday, Israeli police said officers killed a knife-wielding male who tried to attack them near Maale Adumim, a large West Bank settlement near Jerusalem. The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said a 14-year-old Palestinian was killed in the incident.

An Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced families in northern Gaza killed at least 10 people, while another hit a children's hospital, local health authorities said, taking Wednesday's death toll to 20.
Medics said the airstrike on the Yaffa School in the Tuffah area of Gaza City set fire to tents and classrooms. There has been no Israeli comment on the school attack.
Some furniture was still in flames several hours after the strike as people sifted through blackened classrooms and the schoolyard in search of their belongings, Reuters reported.
“We were sleeping and suddenly something exploded, we started looking and found the whole school on fire, the tents here and there were on fire, everything was on fire," said eyewitness, Um Mohammed Al-Hwaiti.
"People were shouting and men were carrying people, charred (people), charred children, and were walking and saying: ‘Dear God, dear God, we have no one but you.’ What can we say? Dear God, only,” she told Reuters.
Medics said at least 10 other people were killed in separate Israeli strikes across the enclave. Since a January ceasefire collapsed on March 18, Israeli attacks have killed more than 1,600 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health authorities, and hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes as Israel seized what it calls a buffer zone of Gaza's land.
On Wednesday, the Gaza Health Ministry said an Israeli missile also hit the upper building of the Durra Children's Hospital in Gaza City, damaging the intensive care unit and destroying the solar panel system that feeds the facility with power. No one was killed in the hospital strike.
Gaza's healthcare system is close to collapse due to an Israeli blockade on all supplies to Gaza, including fuel and electricity, since the beginning of March, when it relaunched military operations.
It says the blockade is aimed at pressuring the Hamas militants who run Gaza to release 59 remaining Israeli hostages captured in the October 2023 attacks that precipitated the war. Hamas says it is prepared to free them but only as part of a deal that ends the war.
The health ministry said many Palestinian victims of Israeli military strikes remained trapped under rubble and on the roads, as rescue teams are unable to reach them because of ongoing bombardments. The attacks have also hit dozens of bulldozers and machinery used to clear roads, remove debris and to carry out rescue operations.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday it had hit 40 "engineering vehicles" that were used for "terrorist actions", including Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Some of those heavy vehicles were parked on the road and others inside the garages of municipalities.
“The machinery, because they open the streets and retrieve martyrs from under the houses. For a year now, some people have still not been retrieved from under the rubble," said Gaza man Nasser Mohammed Nasser, standing close to the mangled skeletons of destroyed bulldozers and trucks in Jabalia, in the north of the enclave.
Even before Tuesday's Israeli attack, Palestinians had complained they were short of heavy machinery, accusing Israel of refusing to allow the equipment into Gaza in violation of the January ceasefire deal.

Israel Presses Onslaught in Gaza’s Khan Younis as US Pursues Ceasefire Quest