Deadly strikes in Gaza and Lebanon, diplomatic efforts continue for a truce

Strikes attributed to Israel have killed at least 25 died Saturday in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, at a time when The United States, determined to prevent an armed escalation in the region, continues its efforts to obtain a ceasefire agreement fire between Israel and Hamas.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due to fly to Israel on Saturday to seek “to conclude a agreement” based on a new U.S. ceasefire proposal, according to the State Department.

On the ground, the Israeli army is relentlessly continuing its offensive in the Gaza Strip, triggered by the unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7 on Israeli soil.

The Civil Defense of the Palestinian territory, besieged and devastated by more than ten months of war, announced that 15 members of the Ajlah family, including three women and nine children, had been killed in an Israeli night strike in al-Zawayda, in the center of the Gaza Strip.

According to Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal, the children killed were between two and 17 years old.

“Around 1 a.m., three missiles hit the house directly,” Ahmed Abou al-Ghoul told AFP, among Palestinians searching through the rubble and evacuating bodies.

Relatives of victims of an Israeli strike gather at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on August 17, 2024, against the backdrop of the conflict between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas © AFP – Eyad BABA

“There were mainly children and women inside,” he adds.

Questioned by AFP, the army did not comment on this information.

– “New Israeli conditions –

In Lebanon, an Israeli strike, among the deadliest in the last ten months, killed ten Syrian nationals including a woman and her two children in the Nabatieh sector, in the south of the country, the Health Ministry announced.

The Israeli army, for its part, indicated that it had struck in the area “during the night, a Hezbollah weapons warehouse”, which has opened a front against Israel in support of Hamas since October 8.

This violence comes the day after the conclusion in Doha of “constructive” negotiations with a view to a ceasefire in Gaza, which are to continue next week in Cairo, according to the mediating countries, the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

An agreement has “never been so close”, assured the American president, Joe Biden, on Friday, after the presentation of a new proposal by the United States with a view to its “implementation”.

This revised version is based on a road map presented by President Biden at the end of May, providing in a first phase a six-week truce accompanied by an Israeli withdrawal from densely populated areas of Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for that of Palestinian prisoners.

Relatives of victims of an Israeli strike gather at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on August 17, 2024, amid the conflict between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas © AFP – Eyad BABA

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Hamas officials, who did not participate in the discussions but were informed of them, nevertheless rejected Israeli “new conditions”.

The new version incorporates the “conditions of the (Israeli) occupier and does not lead to an agreement,” a leader of the movement told AFP, on condition of anonymity.

– “Cataclysmic consequences” –

Among the Israeli conditions rejected by Hamas, another official of the Islamist movement cited the “maintenance of troops” by Israelis along the Gaza border with Egypt and “a right of veto” on Palestinian prisoners who could be exchanged for hostages.

After more than ten months of conflict, diplomatic efforts are also aimed at preventing a response from Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah, to the assassination, attributed to Israel, of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, a day after the death of the military leader of the Lebanese Islamist movement, Fouad Shokr, in an Israeli strike near Beirut.

Iran will suffer “cataclysmic” consequences in the event of an attack on Israel, a senior American official warned on Friday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said he wants to continue the war until the destruction of Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007 and is considered a terrorist organization by his country, the United States and the European Union.

A child looks out of a car window as Palestinians flee with their belongings in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza Strip, on August 16, 2024 © AFP – Eyad BABA

The Hamas attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people abducted that day, 111 are still being held in Gaza, including 39 declared dead by the army.

The retaliatory offensive launched by Israel in Gaza has left at least 40,005 dead, according to the Hamas Health Ministry, which does not provide details on the number of civilians and fighters killed.

It has plunged the Palestinian territory into a catastrophic humanitarian situation, with the vast majority of Gaza's 2.4 million inhabitants having been displaced.

The Palestinian Authority's Health Ministry announced Friday the first confirmed case of polio in the Gaza Strip, which has been free of the disease for 25 years according to the UN, which is calling for “humanitarian pauses” to vaccinate more than 640,000 children.

On the ground, the Israeli army said Saturday it had eliminated several “terrorists” in Rafah and Khan-Younès (south) and in the center of the Gaza Strip.

A man inspects the damage to a building after an Israeli strike in the Nabatieh area of ​​southern Lebanon on August 17, 2024, amid clashes between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah © AFP – Mahmoud ZAYYAT

The Israeli army said on Friday that it had issued new evacuation orders for areas of Deir al-Balah (center) and Khan Younès which led, according to the UN, to the flight of “thousands” of Gazans, forced to “leave in a hurry, without knowing where to go, in the midst of death and destruction”.

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