Israeli strikes kill scores in Gaza as Egypt offers new ceasefire proposal

Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip killed more than 65 Palestinians over the past day, including women and children, the Gaza Health Ministry said Monday. 

In less than a week of air and ground operations since Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, its forces have killed hundreds of people in Gaza — sending the death toll from 17 months of war soaring above 50,000.

Meanwhile, officials say Egypt has introduced a new proposal to try and get the ceasefire back on track.

Hamas would release five living hostages, including an American-Israeli, in return for Israel allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza and a weekslong pause in the fighting, an Egyptian official said Monday. Israel would also release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

A Hamas official said the group had “responded positively” to the proposal, without elaborating. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media on the closed-door talks.

Here’s the latest:

Israel says it intercepts rockets fired from Gaza

Two rockets were intercepted after crossing into Israeli territory next to the Gaza Strip, setting off air raid sirens on Monday evening, the Israeli military said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Al-Quds Brigades, the military arm of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, claimed responsibility for firing a barrage of rockets toward the area of southern Israel bordering Gaza.

Militants in Gaza have fired a handful of rockets at Israel in the days since it broke the ceasefire, which have been intercepted or fell in open areas. Islamic Jihad is the smaller of Gaza’s two main Palestinian militant groups.

Israeli strike kills 5 people, including 2 women

An Israeli strike killed at least five people including two women in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the Health Ministry’s emergency service said. The strike Monday afternoon hit a house in the Qisan al-Najjar area, south of Khan Younis, it said.

UN says it will ‘reduce its footprint’ in Gaza after a deadly Israeli strike on its compound and the cutoff of aid

The United Nations said Monday it will “reduce its footprint” in the Gaza Strip after an Israeli tank strike hit one of its compounds, killing one staffer and wounding five others last week.

Israel has denied it was behind the March 19 explosion at the U.N. guesthouse in central Gaza. In a statement Monday, U.N. Secretary-General spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said that “based on the information currently available,” the strikes on the site “were caused by an Israeli tank.”

The Israeli military did not immediately comment.

Dujarric also said the U.N. would be cutting back about a third of its approximately 100 international staffers in Gaza. He said the U.N. “is not leaving Gaza,” pointing out that it still has about 13,000 national staff in Gaza, mainly working for UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

The U.N. “has made taken the difficult decision to reduce the Organization’s footprint in Gaza, even as humanitarian needs soar,” he said. The move comes as Israel has cut off all food, fuel, medicine and other supplies to Gaza’s around 2 million people for more than three weeks.

EU says resuming talks on the Gaza ceasefire is the only way forward

“Violence feeds more violence,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Monday at a briefing in Jerusalem, where she met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, less than a week after Israel broke the ceasefire in Gaza.

“What we are witnessing now is a dangerous escalation. It is causing unbearable uncertainty for the hostages and their families and is likewise causing horror and death for the Palestinian people,” she added.

Saar said the “war can end tomorrow with releasing our hostages, the demilitarization of Gaza and the withdrawal of the armed Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces.”

Strike damages a Red Cross office in southern Gaza

The building was hit “by an explosive projectile despite being clearly marked and notified to all parties,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement decrying the attack Monday.

No staff members were hurt, but damage to the office in Rafah “has a direct impact on the ICRC’s ability to operate” at a time when the Red Cross field hospital in Rafah is treating casualties from the war, the statement said.

The ICRC statement did not say who might’ve been responsible for attacking their office. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the strike. Israeli forces have been advancing into Rafah in recent days.

Israeli strikes kill 2 journalists in Gaza, including a contributor to Al Jazeera

Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite news network says one of its Palestinian freelance reporters, Hossam Shabat, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his car in northern Gaza.

Shabat was killed Monday while covering the war for the broadcaster’s Arabic-language TV channel, the network said. He had been wounded by an Israeli strike last November, the network reported at the time.

Another Palestinian journalist was killed in a separate Israeli airstrike earlier Monday in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, according to Nasser Hospital. Mohammed Mansour was a correspondent for the news website Palestine Today.

Al Jazeera is one of the few international media outlets to remain in Gaza throughout the war. The channel is owned by Qatar, which alongside Egypt and the U.S. has been a key negotiator for the ceasefire.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike that killed Shabat.

Israel has accused other Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza of being Palestinian militants. The channel denies the accusations and says Israel is trying to silence journalists covering the war.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

--Agencies