CAIRO: As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hurried to Tel Aviv in an attempt to advance talks for a Gaza ceasefire, Israeli attacks in Gaza on Sunday claimed the lives of at least 25 Palestinians, six of them were children, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Health officials reported that the children and their mother perished in an Israeli attack on a home in Deir Al-Balah, but the Israeli military countered that 20 Palestinians were killed and that rocket launchers being deployed from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza were destroyed.
Since October of last year, there have been 40,099 Palestinian deaths, largely civilians, as a result of the recent strikes. This has heightened international efforts to broker a ceasefire. This week in Cairo, negotiations facilitated by the United States, Egypt, and Qatar are scheduled to resume after Hamas boycotted the Doha meeting following the assassination of its leader, Ismail Haniyeh.
After arriving in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Secretary Blinken will meet separately with President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday before leaving for Egypt on Tuesday.
“What did they do wrong?”
Previously, at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, family members gathered around the white shrouded bodies of the mother and her six children. During the funeral, their grandfather Mohammed Khattab revealed that the youngest was eighteen months old.
What offense did they commit? .. Had they murdered a Jew? Did they shoot Jewish people? Did they shoot Jews with rockets? Did they bring Israel to an end? How did they act? Khattab questioned, “What did they do to deserve this?
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are always desperate to find a safe place to live after ten months of fighting.
“We’re beyond being uprooted. Tamer Al-Burai, a resident of Deir Al-Balah, said, “People are being forced into small areas in Deir Al-Balah and Al-Mawasi, which have turned into pressure cookers.” Burai said there were tanks only 1.5 km distant.
Thousands of people who had been evacuated by prior fighting had been living in appalling conditions in regions east of Deir Al-Balah and north of Khan Yunis when the Israeli military ordered their evacuation.
The portion of the “humanitarian area” that Israeli forces deemed safe has shrunk to approximately 11% of the whole region, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
A blast near their vehicle near Lebanon’s southern border injured three UN peacekeepers who were patrolling the area of Yarine in south Lebanon, according to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon.
