Cease-fire hopes fade as Israel massacres scores in Gaza, Lebanon
Prospects of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah ran aground on Friday as Israeli airstrikes killed at least 64 people in the Gaza Strip, according to medics in the Palestinian enclave, and battered Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Hamas did not favor a temporary truce that US envoys had been working to secure, the resistance group’s Al-Aqsa TV reported on Friday. The cease-fire proposals failed to meet its conditions that any deal must end the year-long war in Gaza and include a withdrawal of Israeli forces from there, it said, Reuters reported.
Medics in Gaza said about 64 people were killed and dozens more injured overnight and into Friday morning in Israeli strikes on the city of Deir Al-Balah, the Nuseirat camp and the town of Al-Zawayda, all in the central area of Gaza as well as in its south.
Fourteen people were killed by an Israeli strike at the gate of a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Nuseirat, according to medics at the camp’s Al-Awda Hospital. Another 10 were killed in a car in Khan Younis in the south of Gaza, medics said.
Israel also pummeled Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday morning with at least 10 strikes, Reuters journalists said. It was the first bombardment on the area - once a densely-packed district and Hezbollah stronghold - in nearly a week. Resistance media reports said some 40 were killed on Friday in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley.
The strikes came after Israel issued evacuation orders for 10 separate neighborhoods.
Hamas television, quoting a leading source in the group, said the cease-fire proposals did not meet its conditions.
“The proposals do not include a permanent cessation of aggression, withdrawal of occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, or the return of displaced people,” the source said. “Nor did they address Palestinians’ need for security, relief and reconstruction, and the full reopening of border crossings.”