Israel loses 24 troops in single day in Gaza
PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: Israel’s army said on Tuesday it had suffered its biggest single-day losses since the start of its ground war in the Gaza Strip amid growing pressure on THE GOVERNMENT TO fiND A WAY TO END THE CONflICT.
The heavy clashes came as a White House official was due in the region for talks aimed at securing the release of more hostages, and as United States media reported a new Israeli proposal for a deal that would involve a twomonth pause in fighting.
Twenty-four soldiers were killed on Monday, with military spokesman Daniel Hagari saying 21 reservists were slain when rocketpropelled grenade fire hit a tank and two buildings they were trying to blow up.
“We worked to find the victims until the last hours,” Hagari said in a televised statement, pointing to the difficulty of extracting bodies buried under the rubble. “Our reservists sacrificed what was dearest to them, so that we could all live here in complete safety.”
The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said “ground operations, fighting and attacks intensified” around Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Younis.
The Israeli army said its forces had conducted multiple raids and taken control of Hamas command center in the city.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israeli forces had hit its headquarters in Khan Younis “with artillery shelling on the fourth floor, coinciding with intense gunfire from Israeli drones, resulting in injuries among internally displaced individuals who sought safety on our premises.”
UN agencies and aid groups have sounded the alarm about the growing threat of disease and famine in Gaza, where 1.7 million people are estimated to have been displaced from their homes.
The war in the Palestinian territory broke out with Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally based on Israeli official figures.
In response, Israel has carried out a relentless offensive that has killed at least 25,295 people in Gaza, about 70 percent of them women, children and teenagers, the Health Ministry in the Hamasrun territory said.
The Hamas attacks also saw about 250 hostages seized, and Israel says about 132 remain in Gaza. That number includes the bodies of at least 28 dead hostages, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
About 100 hostages, including foreigners, were released during a weeklong truce last November, the Israelis among them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Relatives of those still held captive stormed a parliamentary committee meeting on Monday demanding urgent action.
“You sit here while our children are dying over there,” yelled Gilad Korngold, father of hostage Tal Shoham, an AFP correspondent reported.
US news outlet Axios reported on Monday night that Israel had proposed to Hamas, via Qatari and Egyptian mediators, a new deal to free all the hostages.
The report, citing unnamed Israeli officials, said the proposed deal would be carried out in multiple stages, and would also involve the release of an undetermined number of Palestinian prisoners.
The plan was expected to take about two months to complete.
The proposal does not include promises to end the war, but it would involve Israeli troops reducing their presence in major cities in Gaza and gradually allowing residents to return to the territory’s devastated north, Axios said.
News of the proposal comes as US media said the White House’s coordinator for the Middle East, Brett McGurk, was expected in Egypt and Qatar for meetings aimed at securing a new hostage exchange deal.
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel, however, said Washington still believed “a two-state solution, a creation of a Palestinian state, is the only path that gets us out of this endless cycle of violence.”
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has steadfastly rejected calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, saying Israel must maintain “security control over all the territory west of the Jordan” River, an area that includes all of the Palestinian territories.