Blinken returns to Israel as US pushes for Gaza ceasefire
- 18 Aug 2024
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due in Israel on Sunday as mediators seek to cement a Gaza ceasefire deal, while a senior Hamas official dismissed "American diktats" in negotiations.
Making his ninth trip to the Middle East since the Gaza war broke out with the Palestinian group's October 7 attack, Blinken is expected to meet Israeli leaders before truce talks resume in Cairo in the coming days.
US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators have said negotiations to clinch a ceasefire in the more than 10-month-old war were making progress, and US President Joe Biden said "we are closer than we have ever been".
Strikes in Lebanon, Gaza
As efforts towards a long-sought truce continued, so has the violence in Gaza but also in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Lebanon, where Hamas ally Hezbollah has traded near-daily fire with Israeli forces throughout the war.
Lebanon's health ministry said an Israeli air strike on Saturday in the Nabatieh area killed 10 Syrians, including a woman and her two children, one of the deadliest attacks on south Lebanon since October.
A Palestinian woman mourns her child and her husband killed in an Israeli army bombardment of the Gaza Strip. AP
Israel's military said it struck a Hezbollah weapons storage facility.
In Hamas-run Gaza, the civil defence agency said an Israeli air strike killed 15 people from a single Palestinian family.
"We are in the morgue seeing indescribable scenes of limbs and severed heads and children who are dismembered," said Omar al-Dreemli, a relative.
The Israeli military told the media its forces had targeted rocket launchers in central Gaza and that it was looking into "reports... that as a result of the strike, civilians in an adjacent structure were killed".
The deaths in Al-Zawaida helped push the Gaza health ministry's war death toll to 40,074.
Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
The war has destroyed much of Gaza's housing and healthcare infrastructure, leaving children vulnerable to preventable diseases.
The United Nations appealed on Friday for seven-day pauses in the fighting so it could vaccinate children against polio, as the Palestinian health ministry reported Gaza's first polio case in 25 years.
Agence France-Presse
