Israel kills 62 people in overnight strikes

Palestinian Territories – AFP

Israel bombarded the southern Gaza Strip overnight, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepared to travel to Egypt on Thursday for more talks aimed at containing Israel’s war on Gaza.

Hamas’s press office said early Thursday that 62 people had been killed in strikes overnight, including around Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Yunis.

In Deir al-Balah, also in central Gaza, people wounded in a strike at a nearby school were brought to the Al-Aqsa hospital.

“There are injured people at the school since last night, no cars or ambulances are reaching it — nothing,” Ramadan Darwit told AFP at the hospital.

Blinken was set to meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo, a day after talks with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmud Abbas, who “committed” to reforming the body to potentially reunite Gaza and the occupied West Bank under its leadership after the war, Blinken said.

The Middle East trip, his fourth aimed at preventing the conflict’s spread, coincided with a UN Security Council resolution on Wednesday demanding an “immediate” end to attacks in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi rebels carried out in solidarity with Hamas.

It also comes as Israel was set to face accusations brought by South Africa at the UN’s top court on Thursday that it has committed “genocidal” acts in Gaza, charges both Israel and Blinken have dismissed as baseless.

– ‘Indescribable’ crisis –

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths posted on the social media platform X that Gaza’s health sector “is being slowly choked off”.

The World Health Organization called the humanitarian situation “indescribable”.

In the southern border town of Rafah, which has been overrun with displaced people fleeing Israeli attacks further north, former Gaza health ministry staffer Zaki Shaheen converted his shop into a makeshift clinic.

Shaheen said he had worked in emergency care “my whole life”.

“So we decided to open a medical department, and we got help from the health ministry,” he told AFP, noting the goal was to take pressure off of already-overburdened hospitals.

“We receive no less than 30 or 40 cases per day, morning to night. I’ll be sleeping, then someone comes in with an injury or a burn, so we treat them.”

The United Nations estimates 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced inside the territory, which had already endured years of blockade and poverty.

Blinken sketched out a possible post-war future for Gaza after meeting Abbas and Bahrain’s King Hamad on Wednesday.

Blinken told Abbas that Washington supported “tangible steps” towards the creation of a Palestinian state — a long-term goal that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government has opposed.

In Bahrain, Blinken said Abbas was “committed” to reforming the Palestinian Authority “so that it can effectively take responsibility for Gaza, so that Gaza and the West Bank can be reunited under a Palestinian leadership”.