Gaza war rages into fourth month as Blinken tours Middle East

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

Israeli airstrikes 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.

The Israeli army — which said Saturday it had “dismantled” Hamas’s military leadership in northern Gaza — reported that its forces had killed more “terrorists” in central Gaza, including in a drone strike in the Bureij refugee camp, a built-up urban area.

The military added it had disabled dozens of rocket launchers at a compound in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia area, from where Palestinian militants have been targeting communities in southern Israel.

During the Gaza war, violence has also flared between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah, 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 Hamas attacks that began the war.

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

– ‘Unnecessary war’ –

The war in Gaza was triggered by an unprecedented attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

The militants also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel. At least 24 are believed to have been killed.

In response, 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.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed again that Israel would continue its campaign to “eliminate Hamas, return our hostages and ensure that Gaza will no longer be a threat to Israel”.

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, Hezbollah 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 Defense Department official told AFP that Israel carried out the strike that killed Aruri.

The Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah “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”.

– ‘Epic catastrophe’ –

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 Jordan’s 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 Hezbollah’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.

Outside Jordan’s capital, ahead of Blinken’s visit to a World Food Programme aid warehouse, senior UN official Sheri Ritsema-Anderson described the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic. This is epic”.

She said the Gaza war raging for the past three months had claimed the lives of more than 140 UN staff, “the single largest number of casualties in any conflict in modern history for the United Nations”.