Israeli fire kills four Palestinians in Gaza Strip and three in West Bank
Israeli strikes have killed dozens of Palestinians who the army says violated the ceasefire by approaching its troops or entering unauthorised areas.
Israeli fire has killed four people and injured 14 others in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, Palestinian officials said, even as a fragile ceasefire with Hamas has largely held.
Israeli strikes have killed dozens of Palestinians who the army says had approached its troops or entered unauthorised areas in violation of the January truce.
Israel last week suspended supplies of goods and electricity to the territory of more than two million Palestinians as it tries to pressure the militant group to accept an extension of the first phase of their ceasefire, which ended on March 1.
Israel wants Hamas to release half of the remaining hostages in return for a promise to negotiate a lasting truce.
Hamas instead wants to start negotiations on the ceasefire’s more difficult second phase, which would see the release of remaining hostages from Gaza, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and a lasting peace. Hamas is believed to have 24 living hostages and the bodies of 35 others.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said three Palestinians, including a 58-year-old woman, were killed by Israeli fire in the volatile West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday.
The Israeli military said troops killed two militants in an exchange of fire in Jenin and arrested 10 others. It said its forces eliminated a third militant who had fired at them during the operation and destroyed two vehicles loaded with weapons.
Israel launched a large-scale military operation centred on Jenin shortly after reaching a fragile ceasefire with Hamas in the Gaza Strip in January. Troops have destroyed homes and infrastructure, and tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled their homes across the northern West Bank.
The Gaza Health Ministry said four people have been killed by Israeli fire and another 14 injured over the past 24 hours.
The ministry said on Tuesday that rescuers have also retrieved 32 bodies from under the rubble.
The four killed included three brothers hit by a drone strike in the central Gaza Strip on Monday and a woman killed by a drone strike in the southern city of Rafah on Tuesday, the ministry said.
The latest deaths take the overall Palestinian death toll from the war to 48,503. More than 110,000 people have been injured, according to the ministry.
The ministry says women and children make up most of the dead but does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its toll. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.
The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 people.
Meanwhile, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, said on Tuesday that deadly sectarian violence in neighbouring Syria amounts to “ethnic cleansing” and that Israel is working to prevent a threat along its border from Syria’s new “jihadi regime”.
“Israel is committed to preventing what we saw in Syria this weekend from happening on our border,” she said at a news conference in Jerusalem.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said 1,130 people were killed in the clashes, including 830 civilians, most of them from former president Bashar Assad’s Alawite community. The Associated Press could not independently verify these numbers.
Since Islamist-led insurgents ousted Mr Assad in December, Israel has voiced concerns that the group could seize Syrian military assets and use them against it, or that instability could spill over into its territory.
Israel has deployed troops inside a buffer zone and vowed to prevent the new Syrian forces from entering the area south of Damascus.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military said its fighter jets struck military targets in southern Syria, including radars and equipment.
