Fresh overnight Israeli strikes in Gaza tore into residential buildings and killed at least eight people, local authorities said, even as Hamas announced it had accepted the latest phase of a proposed deal aimed at ending the war.
On Friday, Hamas said it agreed to a plan backed by US President Donald Trump that includes provisions for handing over its weapons and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
Israel has not issued an official response. However, a political source told AFP “that there will be no withdrawal whatsoever” without Hamas’s “genuine disarmament”.
Gaza civil defence officials said the latest fatalities came from strikes around midnight that hit several residential buildings.
In one strike near central Gaza, a man and his wife were killed and several others were wounded when an Israeli military helicopter hit an apartment, according to a civil defence spokesman.
Elsewhere, an elderly man and a child were killed when an apartment west of Gaza City was struck. Three more people, including a child, were hit in another strike that targeted an apartment northwest of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, officials said.
Earlier yesterday, authorities reported eight other deaths in strikes that damaged a hospital’s medical supplies and hit a rooftop.
Gaza authorities recover 112 bodies in rubble of enclave
Gaza authorities also said they recovered the remains of another 112 people from the rubble, part of painstaking efforts in an enclave devastated by more than two years of Israeli strikes.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said it uncovered remains or body parts after 136 hours of digging — much of it carried out by hand — in Sabra, a neighbourhood in the south of Gaza City.
According to the agency, which functions as a rescue service under Hamas, the remains included 40 children, 38 women and seven people with physical disabilities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it supported the recovery operation, which unfolded over nearly two weeks.
“For more than two and a half years, thousands of families in Gaza have lived in pain and uncertainty, waiting for the chance to recover the remains of their loved ones, mourn them and lay them to rest with dignity,” said Amani Al-Naouq, ICRC spokesperson in Gaza.
“The search for missing persons and the recovery of human remains is a critically important humanitarian issue,” she told AFP.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said it found the remains or body parts following 136 hours of digging, largely with bare hands, in Sabra, a neighbourhood in the south of Gaza City (file pic)
Colonel Mohammed Abu Dan, who oversees the site for the civil defence agency, said teams still had not located 157 other bodies believed to be buried under the debris there.
He said the work has been grueling, with responders forced to sift manually through collapsed concrete and mangled metal.
Across Gaza, thousands of people remain unaccounted for, many believed to be trapped beneath rubble left by intensive Israeli air strikes.
Restrictions on media and limited access inside Gaza mean AFP cannot independently verify tolls or freely report from all areas affected by the violence.
The Hamas-run health ministry says more than 73,300 people have been killed in the war, figures the United Nations considers reliable.
The conflict began when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing 1,221 people and taking 251 hostages to Gaza in what was the deadliest assault on Israel’s population since the state was founded in 1948.
