The China Mail - Israel strikes Gaza as PM vows to bring hostages home

Netanyahu's remarks came amid confusion about the fate of a proposed 70-day ceasefire that was to see the release of 10 Israeli hostages alongside more Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has in recent weeks expanded its offensive in the Gaza Strip, drawing international condemnation as aid trickles in following a monthslong blockade that has caused severe food and medical shortages.

"If we don't achieve it today, we will achieve it tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. We are not giving up," Netanyahu said of freeing the captives.

"We intend to bring them all back, the living and the dead," he added without mentioning a possible truce.

Militants took 251 hostages during the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel which triggered the war, 57 of whom remain in Gaza including 34 who the Israeli military says are dead.

Hamas said Monday it had accepted a new ceasefire proposal by US envoy Steve Witkoff, presented by mediators, but a spokesman for Witkoff later denied the Palestinian group had accepted.

"What I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable," the US envoy told the US news outlet Axios.

In Gaza, an early-morning Israeli strike on the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school, where displaced people were sheltering, killed "at least 33, with dozens injured, mostly children", civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said Monday.

The Israeli military said it had "struck key terrorists who were operating within a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control centre embedded" in the area, adding that "numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians".

Another Israeli strike killed at least 19 people in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, Bassal said.

European and Arab leaders meeting in Spain over the weekend called for an end to the "inhumane" and "senseless" war, while humanitarian groups said the trickle of aid was not nearly enough.

- 'Open wound' -

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares called Sunday for an arms embargo on Israel.

He also pressed for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza "massively, without conditions and without limits, and not controlled by Israel", describing the territory as humanity's "open wound".

In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz voiced unusually strong criticism of Israel, saying: "I no longer understand what the Israeli army is now doing in the Gaza Strip, with what goal."

The impact on Gazan civilians "can no longer be justified", he added.

Nevertheless, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Berlin would continue selling weapons to Israel.

The Israeli military said Monday that over "the past 48 hours, the (air force) struck over 200 targets throughout the Gaza Strip".

It also said it had detected three projectiles launched from Gaza toward Israel, as the country prepared to celebrate Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking its capture of the city's eastern sector in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

"Two projectiles fell in the Gaza Strip and one additional projectile was intercepted," it said.

- 'Situation is devastating' -

Israel last week partially eased an aid blockade on Gaza that had exacerbated widespread shortages of food and medicine.

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body that coordinates civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, said that "170 trucks... carrying humanitarian aid including food, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical drugs were transferred" into Gaza on Monday.

A top World Health Organization official deplored Monday that none of the agency's trucks with medical aid had been allowed to enter the Gaza Strip since Israel ended its blockade.

For more than 11 weeks, "there has been no WHO trucks entering into Gaza for medical care support", the WHO's Eastern Mediterranean regional director Hanan Balkhy said, adding that "the situation is devastating".

Also on Monday, the controversial US-backed group Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it had begun distributing food aid in the territory.

"More trucks with aid will be delivered tomorrow, with the flow of aid increasing each day", it said in a statement.

While Israel has restricted aid reaching Gaza, the war has made growing food next to impossible, with the UN saying on Monday just five percent of Gaza's farmland was now useable.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Monday that at least 3,822 people had been killed in the territory since Israel ended the ceasefire on March 18, taking the war's overall toll to 53,977, mostly civilians.

Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

J.Liv--ThChM