CAIRO: Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 34 Palestinians overnight and on Tuesday, medics said, as Israeli tanks pushed into areas in central and southern parts of the enclave.

An Israeli air strike killed at least 25 people in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, where Israeli forces have operated since October, and injured dozens of others in a multi-floored building, medics said.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency said most of those killed were from the same family, including women and children. Images posted online, which Reuters couldn’t immediately verify, showed the bodies lined up in a single mass grave in the town.

Another airstrike on a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed at least seven people. It wounded several others, medics and the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said, while another killed two people in Rafah south of the enclave.

In Deir Al-Balah near the coast, Israeli naval forces detained six Palestinian fishermen who tried to sail into the Mediterranean Sea earlier on Tuesday, according to residents.

More than 44,700 Palestinians have been killed in the 14-month-old Israeli military campaign on Gaza that has followed, Gaza health authorities say.

Ceasefire efforts by Arab mediators Egypt and Qatar, backed by the United States, have failed to find agreement, but recent signs of optimism among Israeli and Palestinian officials have suggested a deal to end the war could be closer.

On Monday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas’ increasing isolation after the downfall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad could open the door to a deal to return prisoners but it was too early to say if efforts would succeed.

On Tuesday, a Hamas official declined to disclose the content of negotiations but told Reuters mediators had recently stepped up their efforts, citing the group’s willingness to show the flexibility needed “to end the aggression on our people”.

A Palestinian official with knowledge of the mediation effort said Hamas had asked other Gaza factions to list the names of Israeli and foreign prisoners in their custody, whether dead or alive, signalling potential progress in the talks.

Hamas wants a deal that ends the war and sees the release of Israeli and foreign prisoners held in Gaza as well as Palestinians jailed by Israel, while Netanyahu has vowed the war can only end once Hamas is eradicated.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2024