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Israeli Airstrikes Kill 11 Palestinians in Gaza

A Palestinian child plays near an unexploded Israeli missile among the rubble of a destroyed building at Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, 28 September 2024. (EPA)
A Palestinian child plays near an unexploded Israeli missile among the rubble of a destroyed building at Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, 28 September 2024. (EPA)
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Israeli Airstrikes Kill 11 Palestinians in Gaza

A Palestinian child plays near an unexploded Israeli missile among the rubble of a destroyed building at Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, 28 September 2024. (EPA)
A Palestinian child plays near an unexploded Israeli missile among the rubble of a destroyed building at Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, 28 September 2024. (EPA)

Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 11 Palestinians, health officials in the enclave said on Sunday, as Israeli planes bombarded several northern, central and southern areas.

A school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip was among buildings hit, killing four people and wounded several others, Gaza medics said.

The Israeli military said it struck Hamas fighters operating from a command center embedded in a compound that had previously served as Um Al-Fahm School. It accused Hamas of exploiting civilian facilities and its population for military purposes, which Hamas denies.

In another strike, three people were killed in a house in Gaza City, medics said. Four others were killed in three separate airstrikes in Nuseirat and Khan Younis in central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces pursued their operations in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, and in Gaza City's suburb of Zeitoun, where forces blew up several houses, according to residents and Hamas media.

On Sunday the Israeli military said forces continue the fight in a "multi-front war" and are operating in Gaza to bring Israeli and foreign hostages home and to "dismantle" Hamas.

It said troops discovered and dismantled an underground tunnel route that is approximately 1km long near residential buildings and civilian spaces in central Gaza, adding that they found several rooms and equipment used by Hamas for prolonged periods.

Fighting and Israeli military activities in Gaza have declined in the past week as Israel escalated its military offensive against Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike on Friday. The group announced Nasrallah's death on Saturday.

Most of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have been displaced by the war, in which 41,500 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health authorities.

Israel and Hamas have been fighting since gunmen from the Palestinian group stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing about 250 hostages, going by Israeli tallies.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.