After news of a ceasefire agreement sparked mass rejoicing in Gaza, residents woke up Thursday to columns of smoke, rubble and more deaths following new Israeli air strikes.

“We were waiting for the truce and were happy. It was the happiest night since October 7,” said Gaza resident Saeed Alloush, referring to the Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in 2023.

“Suddenly… we received the news of the martyrdom of 40 people,” including his uncle, Alloush said.

“The whole area’s joy turned to sadness, as if an earthquake struck.”

The latest strikes came after Qatar and the United States announced a fragile ceasefire deal that should take effect on Sunday.

AFP has contacted the Israeli military for comment.

Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency, told AFP on Thursday that at least 73 people had been killed in Israeli air strikes since the announcement on Wednesday.

Among them were 20 children and 25 women, he said, with around 200 others wounded.

As day broke, crowds gathered to inspect and clear the remains of a building reduced to rubble, where chunks of concrete lay interspersed with rebar and personal items scattered across the site.

The scenes mirrored those in other parts of the densely populated territory of 2.4 million people, most of whom have been displaced at least once since war broke out in October 2023.

At Nasser Hospital, the main medical facility of the southern city of Khan Yunis, AFP journalists saw stained metal mortuary stretchers stained in red as staff drained them of the blood of the dead in a strike.

In Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital, where several strike casualties were taken, grieving families knelt by the white shrouds enveloping their loved ones’ bodies.

Rescuer Ibrahim Abu al-Rish told AFP that “after the ceasefire was announced and people were happy and joyful, a five-storey building was targeted, with more than 50 people inside”.

Wearing headlights, first responders and local residents searched through the rubble late at night in the devastated streets of Gaza City.

Abu al-Rish, an ambulance driver for Gaza’s civil defence agency, said Thursday that “shelling is still continuing, targeting one house after another”.

‘Very bloody night’

In the Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, resident Mahmud al-Qarnawi told AFP that until the agreement takes hold, Gazans would remain vulnerable.

“The shooting has not stopped, the planes are still in the air and the situation is difficult,” he said.

As a result, Qarnawi and others AFP spoke to in the nearby city of Nuseirat said they were worried about what could happen next.

“We must remain cautious. And for the next three days, we are afraid of a (possible) bloodbath (worse) than before,” Motaz Bakeer, a displaced Gazan, said from the market at Nuseirat.

International medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said no one could yet feel safe in Gaza.

“Last night it was a lot of cheering for 20 minutes, and then it was a very bloody night,” MSF’s emergency coordinator Amande Bazerolle told AFP by phone from the territory, rounds of shelling audible in the background.

The Israeli cabinet is expected to approve the Gaza deal later Thursday, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office accused Hamas of backtracking on elements of the agreement.

Key mediators Qatar and the United States said Wednesday that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza starting on Sunday, along with a hostage and prisoner exchange.

If the fragile agreement is approved, 33 hostages should be released in a first phase, Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani said.

The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed 46,788 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory considered reliable by the United Nations.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Palestinians gather at at the site of an Israeli strike at a tent camp in Al-Mawasi area, amid Israel-Hamas conflict, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli strikes across Gaza killed more than 30 people as Israel and Hamas continued to weigh the latest cease-fire proposal.

In central Gaza, strikes overnight into July 16 killed 24 people. The deaths in Nuseirat and Zawaida included 10 women and four children.

Hamas has said cease-fire talks meant to wind down the nine-month-long war would continue even after Israel targeted the militant group’s top military commander, Mohammed Deif, whose fate remained unclear. Israel says another senior Hamas militant was killed in that strike that local health officials said killed 90 Palestinians, including children.

International mediators are working to push Israel and Hamas toward a deal that would halt the fighting and free about 120 hostages held by the militant group in Gaza.

The strikes late on July 15 and early July 16 hit four homes, according to emergency workers. An Associated Press journalist saw the bodies, some wrapped in blankets and a floral sheet, as they were ferried to Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Clouds of smoke from Israeli strikes rose above the city.

The military said it “conducted targeted raids on terror targets” in central Gaza, without elaborating. It did not immediately provide details on the targets.

In southern Gaza, nine people were killed in two separate strikes overnight on July 15, according to medical officials and AP journalists. Four were killed in a blast that struck a house in eastern Khan Younis and five were killed in a strike on a street in southernmost Rafah, according to ambulance workers who transported the bodies to Nasser Hospital.

An AP journalist counted the bodies at the hospital before a funeral was held at its gates.

The military said air force planes struck some 40 targets in Gaza over the past day, among them observation posts, Hamas military structures and explosives-rigged buildings.

The war in Gaza, which was sparked by Hamas’ October 7 attack, has killed more than 38,600 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count. The war has created a humanitarian catastrophe in the coastal Palestinian territory, displaced most of its 2.3 million population and triggered widespread hunger.

Hamas’ October attack killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and militants took about 250 hostage. About 120 remain in captivity, with about a third of them believed to be dead, according to Israeli authorities.

Violence has also surged in the West Bank. On July 16 a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli policeman, wounding him lightly, before another officer opened fire, killing the assailant who was identified as a 19-year-old from Gaza.

Geneva:

Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.

The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas operatives rushed across the border into Israeli communities. Israel says the operatives killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragged 253 into captivity in Gaza.

This explainer examines how the Palestinian death count is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH COUNT?

In the first months of the war, death counts were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

From early May, the Health Ministry updated its breakdown of total fatalities to include unidentified bodies which account for nearly a third of the overall deaths. Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry’s emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.

It also began including deaths reported online by family members who had to input information including identity numbers.

IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT COMPREHENSIVE?

The numbers “do not necessarily reflect all victims due to the fact that many victims are still missing under the rubble”, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. In May it estimated that some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

The Lancet medical journal published a letter from three academics on July 5 estimating that indirect deaths, caused by factors such as disease, might mean the death count is several times higher than official Palestinian estimates.

The letter said it was “not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.

The authors said the figure, which made global headlines, was based on what they said was the conservative estimate of four indirect deaths to one direct death based on trends from prior conflicts.

The U.N. human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health have also said during the conflict that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.

HOW CREDIBLE IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT?

Pre-war Gaza had robust population statistics and better health information systems than in most Middle East countries, public health experts told Reuters.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organisation said the ministry has “good capacity in data collection/analysis and its previous reporting has been considered credible”.

The United Nations regularly cites the ministry’s death count figures, while naming the ministry as the source.

Early in the conflict, after U.S. President Joe Biden cast doubt on casualty figures, the health ministry published a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths that had been registered by that point.

Academics looking at details of listed casualties said in a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet medical journal in November that it was implausible that the patterns shown in the list could be the result of fabrication.

However, there are specific questions over the inclusion of 471 people said to have been killed in an Oct. 17 blast at al-Ahli al-Arab hospital in Gaza City. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report estimated that death count “at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum”.

DOES HAMAS CONTROL THE FIGURES?

While Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, the enclave’s Health Ministry also answers to the overall Palestinian Authority ministry in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Gaza’s Hamas-run government has paid the salaries of all those hired in public departments since 2007, including in the Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority still pays the salaries of those hired before then.

The extent of Hamas control in Gaza now is difficult to assess with Israeli forces occupying most of the territory, including around locations of major hospitals that provide casualty figures, and with fighting ongoing.

WHAT DOES ISRAEL SAY?

Israeli officials have said the figures are suspect because of Hamas’ control over government in Gaza. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Mamorstein said the numbers were manipulated and “do not reflect the reality on the ground”.

However, Israel’s military has also accepted in briefings that the overall Gaza casualty numbers are broadly reliable.

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war.

HOW MANY CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED?

The Health Ministry figures do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas combatants, who do not wear formal uniform or carry separate identification.

Israel periodically provides estimates of how many Hamas fighters it believes have been killed. The most recent was Netanyahu’s estimate of 14,000.

Israeli security officials say such estimates are reached through a combination of counting bodies on the battlefield, intercepts of Hamas communications and intelligence assessments of personnel in targets that were destroyed.

Hamas has said Israeli estimates for its losses are exaggerated but has not said how many of its fighters have been killed.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says more than 70% of the dead are women and children. For most of the conflict its figures showed children as representing slightly over 40% of all those killed.

However, conditions in hospitals compiling figures have worsened amid the fighting and many of those killed may not be identifiable due to their injuries.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Al-Jazeera correspondent Wael Al-Dahdouh mourns over the body of one of his three children who were killed along with his wife in an Israeli strike in the Nuseirat camp, at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Al-Balah on the southern Gaza Strip, on Ocober 25, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Wael Dahdouh, was helping broadcast live images of the besieged territory’s night sky when he received the devastating news: His wife, son, and daughter had all been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.

Moments later, the Qatari-based satellite channel switched to footage of Mr. Dahdouh entering al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza before giving way to grief as he peered over the body of his dead son.

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“They take revenge on us in our children?” he said, kneeling over his son’s bloodied body, still wearing his protective press vest from that day’s work.

Mr. Dahdouh’s grandson also was declared dead two hours later, the network reported.

The video was sure to reverberate across the Arab world, where the 53-year-old journalist is well-known as the face of Palestinians during many wars. He is revered in his native Gaza for telling people’s stories of suffering and hardship to the outside world.

According to Al Jazeera, Dahdouh’s family members were killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit Nuseirat Refugee Camp, located in an area of Gaza where the military had encouraged people to go to stay safe. It said a number of other relatives were still missing, and it remained unclear how many others were killed.

Mr. Dahdouh’s family were among the more than 1 million Gaza residents displaced by the war, now in its 19th day, and were staying in a house in Nuseirat when the strike hit, the network said.

The Israeli strikes have killed more than 6,500 Palestinians, Gaza’s Health Ministry says.

The fighting has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel — mostly civilians slain during the initial Hamas attack, according to the Israeli government.

Late Wednesday, Al Jazeera replayed the moment Mr. Dahdouh was informed about the deaths. In an audio recording he is heard picking up a phone and telling a frantic caller multiple times: “Who are you with?”

Earlier, Mr. Dahdouh was on air, covering the aftermath of a separate strike that had killed at least 26 people, according to local officials. Throughout the war, Dahdouh has remained in Gaza City, despite Israeli calls for residents to head south ahead of an expected ground offensive.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled to Nuseirat and other locations in central and southern Gaza, believing them to be safer. But Israeli strikes have continued to pound these areas, which are suffering dire shortages of water, medicine and fuel under an Israeli siege.

“This is the safe area which the occupation army talked about, the moral army,” said Mr. Dahdouh with bitter sarcasm to a fellow a Al Jazeera reporter at the al-Aqsa hospital.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said Mr. Dahdouh’s family “home was targeted” in an “indiscriminate assault by the Israeli occupation.”

The Israeli army had no immediate comment. It says it strikes only Hamas military targets, but the Palestinians say thousands of civilians have died. Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

Israel has threatened to shut down Al Jazeera over its coverage of the war. Al Jazeera is a Qatari state-owned media network, and is deeply critical of Israel, particularly its treatment of Palestinians.

Over the last week, the gas-rich nation of Qatar has emerged as a key intermediary over the fate of more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas militants during their Oct. 7 assault. Qatar has hosted Hamas’ political office in its capital of Doha for over a decade. The capital, Doha, is home to Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader, and also Khaled Mashaal, Haniyeh’s predecessor.

Four of the hostages have been released, a mother and daughter on Friday and two more on Monday. In an interview with Sky News this week, Mashaal said all Israeli hostages could be released if Israel stopped its aerial bombardment of the Gaza.