DEIR AL-BALAH: Israeli forces advanced deeper into the Gaza Strip\u2019s largest city in pursuit of militants who had regrouped there, sending thousands of Palestinians fleeing on Monday from an area ravaged in the early weeks of the nine-month-long war.
\nHamas warned that the latest raids and displacement in Gaza City could lead to the collapse of long-running negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release, after the two sides had appeared to have narrowed the gaps in recent days.
\nIsraeli troops were again battling militants in areas that the army said had been largely cleared months ago in northern Gaza. The military ordered evacuations ahead of the raids, but Palestinians said nowhere feels safe. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands are packed into sweltering tent camps.
\nIsrael ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza in the first weeks of the war and has prevented most people from returning. But hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain, living in shelters or the shells of homes.
\n\u201cWe fled in the darkness amid heavy strikes,\u201d said Sayeda Abdel-Baki, a mother of three who had sheltered with relatives in the Daraj neighborhood. \u201cThis is my fifth displacement.\u201d
\nResidents reported artillery and tank fire, as well as airstrikes. Gaza\u2019s Health Ministry, with limited access to the north, did not immediately report casualties.
\nIsrael issued additional evacuation orders for areas in other neighborhoods of central Gaza City. The military said it had intelligence showing that militants from Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad group were in the area, and called on residents to head south to the city of Deir Al-Balah.
\nIsrael accuses Hamas and other militants of hiding among civilians. In Shijaiyah, a Gaza City neighborhood that has seen weeks of fighting, the military said troops raided and destroyed schools and a clinic that had been converted into militant compounds.
\nThe war has decimated large swaths of urban landscape and sparked a humanitarian catastrophe.
\nObstacles to a deal
\nIsrael and Hamas seem to be the closest they have been in months to agreeing to a ceasefire deal that would pause the fighting in exchange for the release of dozens of hostages captured by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.
\nCIA Director William Burns returned to the region Monday for talks in Cairo, according to Egypt\u2019s state-run Qahera TV, which is close to the security services. An Israeli delegation was also heading to the Egyptian capital, Israeli media reported.
\nBut obstacles remain, even after Hamas agreed to relent on its key demand that Israel commit to ending the war as part of any agreement. A key part of that shift, officials told The Associated Press, is the level of destruction caused by Israel\u2019s rolling offensive.
\nHamas still wants mediators to guarantee that negotiations conclude with a permanent ceasefire, according to two officials with knowledge of the talks. The current draft says the mediators \u2014 the United States, Qatar and Egypt \u2014 \u201cwill do their best\u201d to ensure that negotiations lead to an agreement to wind down the war.
\nIsrael has rejected any deal that would force it to end the war with Hamas intact \u2014 a condition Netanyahu reiterated Sunday.
\nHamas on Monday said it is \u201coffering flexibility and positivity\u201d to facilitate a deal, while accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of \u201cputting more obstacles in the way of negotiations.\u201d
\nMeanwhile, Hamas\u2019 top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, warned mediators of \u201ccatastrophic consequences\u201d if Israel continued its operations in Gaza City, saying Netanyahu and the army would bear \u201cfull responsibility\u201d for the collapse of the talks, the group said in a subsequent statement.
\nThe two officials said there\u2019s also an impasse around whether Hamas can choose the high-profile prisoners held by Israel that it wants released in exchange for hostages. Some prisoners were convicted of killing Israelis, and Israel does not want Hamas to determine who is released. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive talks with the media.
\nBombing keeps responders from bodies
\nInside Gaza, residents saw no end to their suffering.
\nMaha Mahfouz fled her home with her two children and many neighbors in Gaza City\u2019s Zaytoun neighborhood. She said their area was not included in the latest evacuation orders but \u201cwe are panicked because the bombing and gunfire are very close to us.\u201d
\nFadel Naeem, the director of the Al-Ahli hospital, said patients fled the facility even though there was no evacuation order for the surrounding area. He said those in critical condition had been evacuated to other hospitals in northern Gaza.
\nMarwan Al-Sultan, director of the Indonesian Hospital, said it received 80 patients and wounded people from Al-Ahli who were packed into \u201cevery corner.\u201d
\n\u201cMany cases require urgent surgeries. Many cases suffer from direct shots in the head and require intensive care. Fuel and medical supplies are dwindling,\u201d he said in a text message. He said the hospital also received 16 bodies of people killed in the Israeli incursion, half of them women and children.
\nMahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the Civil Defense first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said the neighborhoods of Tufah, Daraj and Shijaiyah had become inaccessible because of Israeli bombing. In a voice message, he said the military shelled houses in Gaza City\u2019s Jaffa area and first responders \u201csaw people lying on the ground and were not able to retrieve them.\u201d
\nThe war has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count.
\nHamas\u2019 cross-border raid on Oct. 7 killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities. The militants took roughly 250 people hostage. About 120 are still in captivity, with about a third said to be dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DEIR AL-BALAH: Israeli forces advanced deeper into the Gaza Strip\u2019s largest city in pursuit of militants who had regrouped there, sending thousands of Palestinians fleeing on Monday from an area ravaged in the early weeks of the nine-month-long war. Hamas warned that the latest raids and displacement in Gaza City could lead to the collapse …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":67067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67074,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67049\/revisions\/67074"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}