Heavy bombardment of Gaza continued on Wednesday as the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was expected to arrive in Cairo to discuss a ceasefire proposal in the Israel-Gaza war that would reportedly involve the staged release of Israeli hostages.
A Hamas official said Haniyeh would be in the Egyptian capital for talks on Wednesday or Thursday, as intense fighting was reported in the south of the territory in Khan Younis and in the north in Gaza City.
The health ministry in Gaza said on Wednesday that 26,900 Palestinians had been killed in the territory since the war began on 7 October, following Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel, and almost 66,000 people had been injured.
Israel said three of its soldiers had been killed in battles in Gaza in the past 24 hours, bringing the total killed since the start of the ground offensive in Gaza to 224.
Fighting was heaviest in Khan Younis around the Nasser hospital, the largest hospital still functioning in the southern half of Gaza where thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering, and the residential area of al-Nimsawi, reports said.
The Hamas media office said “dozens of air raids” had hit the city overnight and the Palestinian Red Crescent said there was shelling and gunfire around another Khan Younis hospital, al-Amal, where the Palestinian news agency Wafa said “armoured tanks continue to intensively target and surround [it] for the 10th day, amid constant shooting to prevent any movement on the ground”.
A 75-year-old woman and a 45-day-old baby had died at al-Amal after suffering a lack of oxygen for several days, and been buried in the hospital compound, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it had been forced to move its operations out of Khan Younis. “We’ve lost a health clinic, major shelters – facilities that were supporting the people of Khan Younis,” said Thomas White of UNRWA.
About 30 bodies were discovered in the grounds of a school in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, according to reports.
Al Jazeera said it had spoken to witnesses who discovered the decomposing bodies under a mound of rubble while clearing out the grounds of the Khalifa bin Zayed primary school. They were contained in individual body bags with identification tags in Hebrew, unverified pictures showed.
It is unclear in what state the bodies were found. The West Bank-based ministry of foreign affairs and Hamas were among those who said the corpses were blindfolded and hands and legs bound with zip ties, indicating they had been summarily executed.
However, journalists in the north of Gaza said only one person had claimed that the bodies were handcuffed and blindfolded, and those claims were amplified without verification. No visual evidence has so far emerged.
The Israel Defense Forces have reportedly previously removed bodies from morgues and exhumed graves in Gaza to check for high value Hamas members or Israeli hostages. The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
Hamas officials told news agencies the new ceasefire proposal involved a three-stage truce. It would first release the remaining civilians among hostages captured on 7 October, then soldiers, and finally the bodies of dead hostages.
Women, children and sick men over the age of 60 would be freed initially, they said. They did not indicate how long the stages would last – although some reports suggested a six-week truce – or what would follow the final stage.
Israel says 132 of the hostages remain in Gaza including at least 29 believed to have been killed.
The plan emerged from talks in Paris involving intelligence chiefs from Israel, the US and Egypt, plus the prime minister of Qatar. Efforts to broker a ceasefire have been under way since an earlier seven-day truce in the fighting in Gaza collapsed. During the lull in fighting in late November, 105 Israeli hostages were freed by Hamas in exchange for the release from Israeli prisons of 240 Palestinians.
Hamas has said it will release the remaining hostages only as part of a wider deal to end the war permanently.
Responding to speculation about a proposal on Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said: “I’ve heard statements about all kinds of deals. So I wish to clarify: we will not end this war with anything less than the achievement of all its objectives. We will not withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip and we won’t release thousands of terrorists. None of that is going to happen. What is going to happen? Total victory.”
Netanyahu is under pressure from the hostages’ families to bring them home, with many saying he should agree to a negotiated release. But far-right parties in his ruling coalition say they will quit rather than endorse a deal that leaves Hamas intact.
Meanwhile, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, appealed to countries to allow UNRWA’s “lifesaving work” to continue. A string of western countries, including the US and the UK, have suspended funding to UNRWA after Israel alleged that a dozen of the agency’s employees in Gaza took part in the 7 October attack.
UNRWA was the “backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza”, said Guterres, adding that he had been “personally horrified” by the allegations.
The Norwegian government said it would maintain its funding to UNRWA, saying it was a “vital lifeline”. Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s foreign minister, said Oslo was standing by its “strong commitment to the agency, and to the Palestinian people”.
He said: “We urge fellow donor countries to reflect on the wider consequences of cutting their funding to UNRWA. UNWRA is a vital lifeline for 1.5 million refugees in Gaza. Now more than ever, the agency needs international support. To avoid collectively punishing millions of people, we need to distinguish between what individuals may have done and what UNRWA stands for.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said halting funding to UNRWA would entail “catastrophic consequences” for people in Gaza. “No other entity has the capacity to deliver the scale and breadth of assistance that 2.2 million people in Gaza urgently need,” he told a press conference in Geneva. He appealed for western countries to reconsider their decision to suspend funding to the agency.
