JERUSALEM - Hamas said it was studying on Saturday the latest Israeli counterproposal regarding a potential ceasefire in Gaza, a day after media reports said a delegation from mediator Egypt arrived in Israel in a bid to jump-start stalled negotiations.
The signs of fresh truce talks come as the United Nations warned that “famine thresholds in Gaza will be breached within the next six weeks” unless massive food assistance arrives. Aid groups say Gaza’s already catastrophic humanitarian conditions would be worsened by an invasion which Israel vows to carry out against Hamas battalions that remain in Rafah, southernmost Gaza.
Rafah, on the border with Egypt, is crowded with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by nearly seven months of war between Israel and the Islamist movement. The area is regularly bombed already. Hospital officials said strikes in Rafah and elsewhere killed more than a dozen people overnight Friday-Saturday.
Among the dead were an entire family, their relative Mohammed Yussef said. “Nobody left: the father, the mother, a girl and two boys” were killed when their house was targeted, he said. Elsewhere in Rafah people searched the rubble of homes that Abed al-Aziz Barhum, a young man with a thin moustache, said were “bombarded without prior warning”. He appealed to “all Arab people to support us against occupation and help us reach a ceasefire”.
