Israeli airstrikes against Palestinian militant targets in the Gaza Strip have continued for a third day, AP reports.
There were no immediate reports of casualties on either side Friday, as foreign mediators pressed ahead with efforts to reach a cease-fire. The past few days of fighting have killed 31 Palestinians in Gaza and a 70-year-old man in central Israel.
An umbrella group of Gaza-based Palestinian factions known as the “joint operations room” said that they’d launched rockets “in response to the assassinations and continued aggression toward the Palestinian people.” Israeli bombs and shells have destroyed 47 housing units, and damaged 19 so badly they were uninhabitable, leaving 165 Palestinians homeless, Gaza’s housing ministry reported. In addition, nearly 300 homes sustained some damage.“The dream that we built for our children, for our sons, has ended,” said Belal Bashir, a Palestinian living in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, whose family home was reduced to a heap of rubble in an airstrike late Thursday.
The civilians deaths have drawn condemnation from the Arab world and concern from the United States and Europe. In its past four wars against Hamas, Israel has repeatedly faced accusations of war crimes due to the high civilian death tolls and its use of heavy weapons against the crowded enclave. Israel, in turn, contends that Palestinian militant groups use civilians as human shields by fighting in their midst.
Both sides had seemed on the brink of a cease-fire before the eruption of Thursday’s violence. Friday’s relative calm boosted hopes of progress. A Palestinian man extinguishes a fire burning in the rubble of a house struck by an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip on Friday.Islamic Jihad political bureau member Mohamad al-Hindi sounded more optimistic. From Cairo, where he traveled Thursday to hash out the details of a possible truce, he told media that he hoped both sides “would reach a cease-fire agreement and honor it today.”
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