CAIRO: Israeli military strikes killed at least 26 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Thursday, medics said, as forces stepped up their bombardment of central areas and tanks pushed deeper into the north and south of the enclave.

The escalation came a day after Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah began a ceasefire in Lebanon, halting more than a year of hostilities and raising hopes among many Palestinians in Gaza for a similar deal with Hamas, which rules the enclave.

Israel’s military campaign — with the avowed intent of eradicating Hamas after the group’s deadly raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — has laid waste to the enclave of 2.3 million people.

“I hope a ceasefire will happen like it did in Lebanon … I just want to take my children to see my land, my house, to see what they did to us, I want to live in safety,” said Amal Abu Hmeid, a displaced woman in Gaza.

“God willing we will have a truce,” she said, sitting in the courtyard of a school sheltering displaced families in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.

The courtyard was filled with dirt and water streamed in from where people did their laundry. Clothes were airing outside classrooms as children played nearby.

“(Life) was beautiful (before the war) … Now there is nothing beautiful, it’s all gone. Our houses are gone, our brothers are gone, and no one is left. Now we hardly get … one meal a day. We can’t even get bread,” Abu Hmeid said.

Announcing the Lebanon accord on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said he would now renew his push for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, urging Israel and Hamas to seize the moment.

Months of efforts to negotiate a ceasefire have yielded scant progress, and negotiations are now on hold. The ceasefire in the parallel conflict in Lebanon took effect before dawn on Wednesday, bringing a halt to hostilities that had escalated sharply in recent months and overshadowed the conflict in Gaza.

Over 44,000 lives lost

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 44,200 people and displaced nearly all the enclave’s population at least once, Gaza officials say. Vast swathes of the territory are in ruins.

On Thursday, the head of the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said at least 70 per cent of those killed in Gaza were women and children.

He said the ongoing Israeli offensive in the northern edge of Gaza for the past seven weeks has uprooted 130,000 people. On Thursday, six people were killed in two separate air strikes on a house and near the hospital of Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, while four others were killed when an Israeli strike hit a motorcycle in Khan Yunis in the south, medics said.

Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2024