CAIRO/GAZA: Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 72 people since Thursday night and Israeli forces launched a night-time raid on a hospital in the north of the enclave, Palestinian officials said.
The Gaza health ministry said a strike on houses in the southern city of Khan Yunis killed at least 38, many of them women and children.
The Israeli military said its forces had killed a number of Palestinian gunmen in air and ground strikes in the southern Gaza Strip and dismantled military infrastructure.
Some residents of Khan Yunis sifted through rubble on Friday in an attempt to retrieve clothes and documents, while children looked for their toys.
Ahmed Sobh recounted how his cousin had screamed "Help me, help me".
"We ran and found her children, a boy and a girl, martyred. Her son was lying under the concrete column, it took us 1.5 hours to get him out," he said.
Ahmed al Farra described digging through rubble to rescue relatives including his mother, adding he had lost 15 members of his extended family during the air strikes.
At the nearby Nasser Hospital, medics prepared the dead, among them three children wrapped in the same white shroud.
In northern Gaza, where an area around the town of Jabalia has been the target of a weeks-long offensive, health officials said Israeli forces stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of three medical facilities struggling to operate there, and stationed forces outside it.
A Hamas official said that a delegation led by the group's chief negotiator Khalil al Hayya arrived in Cairo on Thursday for talks with Egyptian officials.
The official says Hamas was determined any agreement must end the war in Gaza, get Israeli forces out of the enclave and achieve a prisoners-for-hostages swap deal.
US and Israeli negotiators will gather in Doha in the coming days to try to restart talks, officials said on Thursday. Israel is also fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Qatar and Egypt have acted as mediators between Israel and Hamas in months of talks that broke down in August without an agreement to end the war that erupted when Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
The death toll from Israel's retaliatory campaign in Gaza is approaching 43,000, with the densely populated enclave in ruins.
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