DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel pressed its offensive in Gaza on Wednesday, with at least 16 Palestinians reported killed across the strip as Hamas mulled its response to U.S. President Donald
Trump's peace plan for the embattled territory.
The dead included people who had sought refuge in a school sheltering the displaced in Gaza City. Al-Falah school in the city's eastern Zeitoun neighborhood was hit twice, minutes apart, according to officials at Al-Ahli Hospital.
Among the casualties were first responders, they said. Five Palestinians were killed later on Wednesday morning, when a strike hit people gathered around a drinking water tank on the western side of Gaza City, the same hospital said.
Also in Gaza City, the Shifa Hospital said it received the body of a man killed in a strike on his apartment west of the city.
Strikes hit the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing a husband and wife, and the Bureij refugee camp, killing one man, according the Al-Awda hospital. A strike also hit a tent in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah, seriously injuring two people, that hospital said.
Earlier on Wednesday at the same hospital, dozens of people attended a funeral service for a Palestinian freelance journalist, Yahya Barzaq. He was killed Tuesday along five other people in an airstrike while working for Turkish broadcast outlet TRT in the central town of Deir al Balah.
The Israeli army said sirens sounded in communities near the Gaza strip on Wednesday afternoon, after “two projectiles” crossed from there into Israel. No injuries were reported.
The military did not comment on Wednesday’s strikes in Gaza or Barzaq’s death.
More than 200 journalists and media workers have been killed in the region since the attack by Hamas-led militants on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggered the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians and wounded nearly 170,000 others, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants in its toll, but has said women and children make up around half of the dead.
The Hamas-led attack on southern Israel nearly two years ago killed some 1,200 people and 250 others were abducted. Most of the hostages have been freed under previous ceasefire deals, but 48 are estimated to be still held in Gaza — 20 believed by Israel to be still alive.
On Wednesday, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Bader Abdelatty said Trump’s proposal for ending the nearly two-year war in Gaza requires more negotiations on certain elements, echoing remarks made by Qatar a day earlier.
Hamas has said it would study the plan, both within the group and with other Palestinian factions, before responding.
The comments by Qatar and Egypt, two key mediators, appeared to reflect Arab countries’ discontent over the text of the 20-point plan that the White House put out after Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced they had agreed on it Monday.
The plan, which has received wide international support, requires Hamas to release hostages, leave power in Gaza and disarm in return for the release of Palestinian prisoners and an end to fighting. The plan guarantees the flow of humanitarian aid and promises reconstruction in Gaza, placing it and its more than 2 million Palestinians under international governance. However, it sets no path to Palestinian statehood.
The Palestinian government in the occupied West Bank said earlier it welcomed the plan, as did the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
The Israeli military said that starting at midday Wednesday, it would only allow Palestinians to travel south along the only north-south route still open in the coastal strip — meaning, people fleeing the intensifying fighting in Gaza City can continue to head south but they could not go north.
While the military did not offer more details on the closure, the road carries great symbolism for Palestinians. Earlier this year, when Israel opened access to the north — Gaza's most heavily destroyed area — hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crowded it, seeing their return as an act of steadfastness and defiance.
Hundreds of thousands remain displaced across Gaza, and finding food is a daily struggle. On Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said intensifying warfare in Gaza City forced it to suspend its operations there and relocate staff to southern Gaza.
Meanwhile, a widely watched flotilla of activists carrying a symbolic amount of humanitarian aid is sailing toward Gaza, in what organizers have described as the largest attempt to date to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the strip.
The activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla of about 50 vessels say they expect Israeli authorities to intercept them, as has happened in past flotilla attempts to reach Gaza. On Wednesday, they said two of the vessels were harassed by Israeli warships overnight, though it stopped short of intercepting them.
The core vessels set sail from Barcelona, Spain, on Sept. 1, and the flotilla could reach Gaza shores by Thursday, organizers said. Israeli authorities warned the boats would not be allowed to reach Gaza.
Thursday is Yom Kippur — the high Jewish holiday of the Day of Atonement — when stores, businesses, public transportation and broadcasting shut down in Israel, beginning around sundown on Wednesday.
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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Giovanna Dell'Orto in Jerusalem and Renata Brito in Barcelona, Spain, contributed to this report.
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