GAZA STRIP (PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES)  -   Israel pounded Gaza on Friday, nearly 12 weeks into the war started by the October 7 attacks, as Egypt hosted a Hamas delegation for talks aimed at ending the conflict that has devastated much of the besieged Palestinian territory.

With vast areas of northern Gaza in ruins and largely deserted, Israeli air strikes and ground combat have focussed on central and southern districts, driving ever more displaced families into crowded areas around Rafah near the Egyptian border. Intense fighting around central Deir al-Balah and the biggest southern city, Khan Yunis, has driven about 100,000 newly displaced people into already-overcrowded Rafah, said the UN humanitarian office, even as targets there were bombed too. Rafah residents combed through rubble for survivors and bodies after a deadly air strike Thursday. 

One local man, Tayseer Abu al- Eish, said he was at home when “we heard a loud explosion and debris started falling on us. My daughters were screaming.”

The relentless bombardment has caused mass civilian casualties and sparked global calls for a ceasefire as alarm has mounted over the dire fate of Palestinians enduring hunger and sleeping in makeshift shelters in the cold winter months. After another strike, in Deir al-Balah, one bereaved mother, Suhair Nasser, wept as she cradled the bodies of her twin children, exclaiming that “the house was bombed and the debris fell on the kids on December 28, their birthday”. The military said it had “eliminated dozens of terrorists” across Gaza over the past 24 hours and was “extending operations in Khan Yunis”, the hometown of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar. Israel’s relentless military campaign has killed at least 21,507 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. 

Israel’s army says 168 soldiers have been killed inside Gaza. 

Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said Friday it had launched a fresh barrage of rockets at southern Israel.