Gaza war rages into fourth month as Blinken tours Middle East

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — The Hamas-Israel war raging in Gaza entered its fourth month on Sunday as the Israeli forces again pounded the besieged Palestinian territory and US top diplomat Antony Blinken was back in the region seeking to avoid a wider escalation.

Israeli air strikes overnight and early Sunday killed at least 64 people in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory, said its health ministry.

It said two journalists were killed when their car was struck. The ministry, medics, and witnesses identified them as Mustafa Thuria, a video stringer for Agence France-Presse, and Hamza Wael Dahdouh, the son of Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Gaza who earlier lost his wife and two other children in an Israeli strike.

Israeli bombardment also claimed other civilian lives in the southern city of Khan Yunis and in the Rafah area near the Egyptian border, where many of the territory's displaced people have sought refuge, AFP correspondents reported.

Relatives were mourning the dead at Khan Yunis' European Hospital, among them Mohamed Awad, who wept over the body of a 12-year-old boy and listed other family members killed.

"My brother, his wife, his children, his relatives and the brothers of his wife — there are more than 20 martyrs," he said.

During the Gaza war, violence has also flared between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed armed group Hizbollah, which have traded almost daily cross-border fire since the war started.

A recent flareup in tensions and border hostilities had sparked “real concern”, US Secretary of State said ahead of a Jordan visit on Sunday.

“We want to do everything possible to make sure that we don’t see escalation there”, Blinken said on his fourth trip to the Middle East since the October 7.

Blinken warned of the need to end an “endless cycle of violence”.

Deadly violence also flared again in the occupied West Bank, where bloodshed has surged to levels unseen in nearly two decades.

An early morning Israeli strike in Jenin killed six Palestinians, while an Israeli border police officer died when a roadside bomb hit her vehicle Sunday, sources on both sides said.

The Israeli forces later reported an Israeli was shot dead near the West Bank city of Ramallah, and that police were searching for the attacker.

‘Unnecessary war’ 

Israel is carrying out a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,722 people, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

Families and friends of the hostages again rallied in Tel Aviv late Saturday, demanding steps leading to their release but many also voicing anger at his government.

The Netanyahu government is “ruining Israel and they are destroying everything we hoped and dreamed of”, one demonstrator, Shachaf Netzer, 54, told AFP.

“Everybody here wants an election.”

On Israel’s tense northern border with Lebanon, Hizbollah on Saturday said it had fired 62 rockets at an Israeli military base, days after a strike in Beirut killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh Al Aruri.

A US Defence Department official told AFP that Israel carried out the strike that killed Aruri.

The Israeli forces said it had struck Hizbollah “military sites” in response to the rocket barrage, while army spokesman Daniel Hagari warned the Shiite Muslim armed group against “dragging Lebanon into an unnecessary war”.

Top Western diplomats, also including EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, were in the region as part of a fresh push to address mounting fears of a wider conflict and to boost the flow of aid into Gaza.

Blinken held talks with His Majesty King Abdullah II before heading to Qatar and Abu Dhabi later in the day, on a regional tour that was also set to take him back to Israel and the occupied West Bank.

King Abdullah warned Blinken against “the catastrophic repercussions of continuation of the aggression against Gaza, underlining the necessity of ending the tragic humanitarian crisis” there, a statement from the Royal palace said.

Borrell visited Beirut on Saturday, where he met members of Hizbollah’s political wing, and was next headed to Saudi Arabia where he planned to discuss “a joint EU-Arab initiative” for peace.

Civilians in Gaza have borne the brunt of the conflict that has reduced swathes of the coastal territory to rubble and triggered a deepening humanitarian crisis.

“Gaza has simply become uninhabitable,” UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday.