Gaza City is in ruins after fighting between Israel and Hamas
Huge parts of the city center in war-ravaged Gaza City were badly damaged after fighting between Israel and Hamas, and many streets are no longer recognizable.
As the grinding Israel-Hamas conflict reached the three-month mark on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed ahead with an urgent mission to the Middle East amid fears the powder keg region could lead to a larger war.
The visit by Blinken, who was in Jordan on Sunday before traveling to Israel this week, came as the Israeli military indicated it may end heavy fighting in the northern Gaza Strip. Israeli Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said the military would “continue to deepen gains” there but would focus on the central and southern parts of the territory.
The Biden administration has repeatedly called on Israel to limit its offensive in Gaza, which was launched after Hamas' brutal attacks on Israeli border communities on October 7. The militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 people hostage.
Israel's retaliatory strikes in Gaza, home to 2.3 million Palestinians, have left more than 22,700 people dead and 58,000 injured in Hamas-run Gaza, according to the Health Ministry. Israel says many of the casualties are the fault of Hamas, which uses people as shields and operates from residential areas and hospitals.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained steadfast Sunday that the war would not end until Hamas was dismantled and the hostages were returned.
“I say this to both our enemies and our friend,” Netanyahu told his cabinet. “That is our responsibility and that is the obligation of all of us.”
A family's struggle: As Israel's war with Hamas rages on, the family of an American hostage waits anxiously
Developments:
∎ Officials at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis said they had received the bodies of 18 people, including 12 children, who were killed in an Israeli attack late Saturday. More than 50 people were injured in the attack on a house in the Khan Younis refugee camp.
∎ Two journalists were killed in an airstrike near the southern city of Rafah on Sunday, including Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Wael Dahdouh, Al-Jazeera's well-known chief correspondent in Gaza, the Arabic broadcaster and local medical officials said. Al-Jazeera broadcast footage of Dahdouh sobbing next to his son's body and holding his hand. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
∎ Departure and arrival information at Beirut International Airport was replaced on Sunday with a message accusing Hezbollah of exposing Lebanon to all-out war with Israel after opponents of the militant group hacked the screens. Hezbollah has been engaged in a firefight with Israel for several weeks.
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Blinken's trip, his fourth Middle East mission in recent months, comes at a time when developments in Lebanon, northern Israel, the Red Sea and Iraq have raised fears of a broader conflict.
Hours before Blinken's meeting on Saturday, the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah militia fired a volley of rockets into northern Israel, reportedly in response to the targeted killing of a top Hamas leader last week, presumably by Israel. Recent attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on commercial shipping in the Red Sea have also disrupted international trade and led to rising tensions.
Blinken met with Jordan's King Abdullah II and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi on Sunday. The king “warned of the catastrophic impact” of the war and urged the US to call for an immediate ceasefire, a statement from the royal court said.
The State Department said in a readout of the meeting that Blinken “emphasized U.S. opposition to the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the urgent need to protect Palestinian civilians in the West Bank from extremist settler violence.”
During the trip, Blinken again called on Israel to scale back its military offensive and increase the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. He toured the World Food Program's regional coordination warehouse in the Jordanian capital, where trucks are preparing aid for delivery to Gaza through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossings.
Blinken will also travel to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates later on Sunday and to Saudi Arabia on Monday. He will then visit Israel and the West Bank on Tuesday and Wednesday before ending the trip in Egypt.
“These are not necessarily easy conversations,” Blinken said during an earlier stop in Greece. “There are different perspectives, different needs, different requirements. But it is vital that we engage in this diplomacy now, both in the interests of Gaza itself and more broadly in the interests of the future of Israelis and Palestinians and the region as a whole.”
A young Palestinian girl was killed on Sunday evening when Israeli police shot and killed two suspected attackers who rammed their van into a West Bank checkpoint, officials said, amid continued violent incidents in the occupied territories since the start of the war.
The confrontation near the Palestinian village of Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem, came hours after nine people were killed in other unrest in the West Bank.
According to police, a man and a woman in the van were shot, but a girl in another vehicle nearby was also hit. The girl, who was reportedly three or four years old, was pronounced dead by Israel's Magen David Adom ambulance service, with a female officer also slightly wounded. There was initially no information about the condition of the suspects.
The U.N. humanitarian office, known as OCHA, reports that 315 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since the war began on Oct. 7 through Jan. 5, the vast majority of them by Israeli forces. The 507 Palestinians killed in the enclave last year represent the largest number since OCHA began keeping records in 2005.
Omer Neutra's absence hangs on a dog tag around his father's neck and proclaims in Hebrew that his heart is being held captive in Gaza. It's visible in Omer's face emblazoned on his father's T-shirt and in the photos taped to empty chairs at holiday tables.
His absence drives his mother's daily internal conversations with her missing son and her plans for a new apartment waiting for him to rebuild his life. It flickers in the candles that his parents lit and watched burn to chocolate icing on his 22nd birthday.
For three months, it fueled Ronen and Orna Neutra's all-consuming mission to free their son, who grew up on Long Island and deferred college to spend a year in Israel, which led him to join the Israeli army and die on March 7 October to…his apparent capture by Hamas. Read more here.
Contribution: The Associated Press