AGENCIES

Hamas is seeking guarantees that a new US ceasefire proposal for Gaza would lead to the offensive’s end, a source close to the group said yesterday, as medics said Israeli strikes across the territory had killed scores more people.

Israeli officials said prospects for reaching a ceasefire deal and hostage deal appeared high, nearly 21 months since the offensive began.

On the ground, intensified Israeli strikes, artillery or gunfire across Gaza continued unabated, killing at least 69 people yesterday, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP, including 38 people waiting for humanitarian aid.

Israel has recently expanded its military operations in the Gaza Strip, where the offensive has created dire humanitarian conditions and displaced nearly all of the territory’s population of more than two million.

In Gaza City, civil defence official Mohammad al-Mughayyir said there were “17 martyrs, the majority of them children and women, and a large number of injuries in an Israeli air strike on the Mustafa Hafez School, which shelters displaced persons, in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood”.

According to medics at Nasser hospital farther south, at least 38 people were killed by Israeli fire en route to an aid distribution site and scores of people were injured.

Artillery shelling in the northern town of Beit Lahia also killed three people. A strike on Jabalia, also in the north, killed one. Further south, three people were killed in a strike that hit tents housing displaced people in the coastal Al-Mawasi area, Mughayyir said.

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