OCCUPIED Al-QUDS: Bombing continued across Gaza on Friday as the world began to digest Israel’s first proposals for the administration of the territory after its war with group Hamas, now approaching its fourth month.
With much of the Gaza Strip already reduced to rubble, air strikes continued through the night in the southern cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah as well as parts of central Gaza, AFP correspondents reported.
The Israeli army said its forces had “struck over 100 targets” across Gaza over the past 24 hours, including military positions, rocket launch sites and weapons depots.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said it had recorded 162 deaths over the same period.
A fighter jet bombed the central area of Bureij overnight, killing “an armed terrorist cell”, the army said, after what it described as an attempted attack on an Israeli tank.
And “a number” of Palestinian were killed in clashes in Khan Yunis, a city that has become a major battleground, the army said.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s plan for the “day after”, shared with the media late Thursday but not yet adopted by Israel’s war cabinet, says that neither Israel nor Hamas will govern Gaza and rejects future Jewish settlements there.
The minister’s outline proposals were unveiled on the eve of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s fourth trip to the region since a Hamas attack on October 7 triggered the war.
Blinken arriveed in Turkey on Friday on the first leg of a tour that will also take him to Greece and several Arab states before he heads to Israel and the occupied West Bank next week.