CAIRO/BEIRUT: Prospects of a ceasefire between Israel and its foes Hamas and Hezbollah ran aground on Friday as Israeli air strikes killed at least 64 people in the Gaza Strip, according to medics in the Palestinian enclave, and battered Beirut's southern suburbs.
US envoys had been working to secure ceasefires on both fronts ahead of the US presidential election next Tuesday.
But Hamas did not favour a temporary truce, its Al Aqsa Hamas television reported on Friday. The ceasefire proposals failed to meet its conditions that any deal must end the year-long war in Gaza and include a withdrawal of Israeli forces from there, it said.
Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his priority was to enforce security "despite any pressure or constraints".
His office said he relayed this message to US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk in Israel on Thursday. Israel meanwhile pressed on with its military offensives against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon on Friday.
Medics in Gaza said about 64 people were killed and dozens more injured overnight and into Friday morning in Israeli strikes on the city of Deir Al Balah, the Nuseirat camp and the town of Al Zawayda, all in the central area of Gaza as well as in its south.
Fourteen people were killed by an Israeli strike at the gate of a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Nuseirat, according to medics at the camp's Al Awda Hospital. Another 10 were killed in a car in Khan Yunis in the south of Gaza, medics said.
The Israeli military said its troops had killed what it called armed fighters in central Gaza and the northern Jabalia area. It had no immediate comment on the reported school strike, although it habitually denies deliberately attacking civilians.
Israel also pummelled Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday morning with at least 10 strikes, Reuters journalists said. It was the first bombardment on the area - once a densely-packed district and Hezbollah stronghold - in nearly a week.
The strikes came after Israel issued evacuation orders for 10 separate neighbourhoods.
Hassan Saad, speaking in a street in Lebanon's capital Beirut, said: "This is a brutal war and Israel does not have the right to do this... There must be a limit put for Israel because it does not abide by any of the laws or human morality."
Another Beirut man, Ali Ramadan, said he believed the Israeli air strikes were a way to put pressure on Lebanon in the ceasefire negotiations.
Israel's retaliatory offensives have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and reduced most of Gaza to rubble, Palestinian authorities say, and also killed around 2,800 people in Lebanon, according to the health ministry there. — Reuters
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
