A Gaza hospital said four people were killed Thursday in fresh Israeli air strikes on the Palestinian territory, as Israel and Hamas accused each other of violating the fragile weeks-long ceasefire.
The new strikes came the morning after one of the deadliest days in the Gaza Strip since the truce came into effect on October 10, with 27 people killed, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency, which operates under Hamas authority.
The Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza said four people were killed in the strikes early Thursday, after the civil defence agency gave a lower toll of three dead.
The dead included three from one family, including a one-year-old girl, in a strike on a house east of Khan Yunis, and one person in an air strike on the town of Abasan al-Kabira, also east of Khan Yunis.
A source at Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry, who did not wish to be identified, said artillery fire was continuing in the Khan Yunis area.
The so-called yellow line demarcates the boundary inside the Gaza Strip that Israeli troops have withdrawn to positions east of, as part of the US-brokered ceasefire.
“We are aware of a strike east of the yellow line that was done to dismantle terror infrastructures,” the Israeli military told AFP.
“We’re not aware of the reported casualties. It’s part of the regular IDF (Israeli military) operations east of the yellow line.”
Israel has carried out repeated strikes against what it says are Hamas targets during the ceasefire, resulting in the death of more than 312 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
“These ongoing crimes represent a blatant disregard by the occupation for the ceasefire agreement,” Hamas said in a statement.
The Islamist movement urged US President Donald Trump and other mediators of the truce to “take serious action to stop these crimes”.
The UN Security Council voted Monday in favour of a US-drafted resolution endorsing Trump’s Gaza peace plan, though Hamas rejected the resolution as failing to meet Palestinians’ “political and humanitarian demands”.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people.
Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed at least 69,546 people, according to figures from the health ministry that the UN considers reliable.
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