GAZA: Israel carried out deadly air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the war entered its 10th month, with fighting raging across the Palestinian territory and fresh diplomatic efforts underway to halt the violence.
Lebanon's Hezbollah movement fired another 20 rockets at northern Israel, leaving one person injured there, the latest cross-border attacks launched in solidarity with Gaza's Palestinian group Hamas.
The bombardment in besieged Gaza raged on unabated on Sunday, with medics and emergency services in the territory reporting yet more deaths in several strikes.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said the bodies of six people including two children were taken to Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the central city of Deir Al Balah.
And paramedics said six people were killed in one strike on a house in Gaza City and three in another elsewhere in Gaza's largest urban area.
A correspondent said Israeli drones were firing in Gaza City's Shujaiya district, which has been largely evacuated and rocked by intense battles for two weeks.
The Israeli army said that in Shujaiya, its "troops eliminated several gunmen, dismantled infrastructure sites and located numerous weapons, including explosive devices, AK-47 rifles, machine guns and pistols".
On Saturday, the Gaza health ministry said 16 people were killed in a strike on a school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA that was sheltering displaced people in Nuseirat, in central Gaza.
The war began with October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, based on Israeli figures.
In response, Israel has carried out a military offensive that has killed at least 38,098 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the territory.
The war has uprooted 90 per cent of Gaza's population, left almost 500,000 people enduring "catastrophic" hunger and shuttered most hospitals, UN agencies say.
"The situation is very difficult," said Dr Muhammad Salha, acting director of Al Awda Hospital in Jabalia. "There is no fuel in the hospital to work. We only operate the small generator for two hours a day and we have postponed many scheduled operations due to the lack of fuel."
Amid the Gaza war, Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah have exchanged almost daily cross-border fire and the attacks and rhetoric have escalated over the past month, sparking fears of a full-scale war. While the exchanges have been largely restricted to the border areas, Israel has repeatedly struck deep inside eastern Lebanon, including on Saturday in a strike that killed a Hezbollah operative. Early on Sunday, air raid sirens again sounded across northern Israel and the army then reported that 20 rockets were fired, some of which were intercepted by air defence systems. — AFP
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