US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday (June 10,) pushing a ceasefire plan that the UN Security Council later supported in an effort to halt eight months of war in the Gaza Strip.
Blinken met for around two hours in Jerusalem with Netanyahu and discussed diplomacy towards a ceasefire, US officials said, before the Security Council adopted a US-drafted resolution supporting the ceasefire plan.
Blinken is on his eighth visit to the region since the war began on October 7 with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel.
Netanyahu has been politically buoyed in Israel by a rescue mission that succeeded in freeing four hostages on Saturday — but which was deadly and destructive for Palestinians.
A day later, though, Netanyahu received his first major political blow of the conflict when Benny Gantz and a second member of the war cabinet quit.
Gantz, a former army chief, criticised Netanyahu for failing to outline a post-war governance plan for Gaza, and said the prime minister “is preventing us” from a “real victory”.
Witnesses in north and central Gaza reported helicopter gunfire and naval shelling hitting Gaza City, and air strikes on Deir al-Balah during the latest fighting.
Street battles raged in the southern areas of Rafah and Khan Yunis, where bodies were seen lying in the streets and Palestinian civilians were fleeing an AFP correspondent said.
Outside the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, a grief-stricken man lay down among white-shrouded bodies to hug one of them after they were loaded onto a truck. Other men had to pull him from the body bag.
MAJOR CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN HOSTAGE RESCUE
The latest clashes follow major combat and heavy air strikes during Saturday’s hostage rescue mission in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.
While Israelis celebrated the return of the four captives in good physical health, Palestinians condemned a toll that health officials in the Hamas-ruled territory said killed 274 people and wounded almost 700, many of them women and children.
“The images of death and devastation following Israel’s military operation there prove that each day this war continues, it only grows more horrific,” a UN report late Monday quoted Martin Griffiths, the world body’s humanitarian chief, as saying.
Hamas’s October attack, which began the bloodiest-ever Gaza war, resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, more than 100 of whom were released during a November truce. After Saturday’s rescue mission, 116 hostages remain in Gaza, though the army says 41 of them are dead, including Yoram Metzger, 80.
SOME HOSTAGES BLAME ISRAEL GOVERNMENT
His wife Tami Metzger blames her own government for his death.
“If the government had stopped the war” he would still be alive, said Metzger, whose husband remained in Gaza after her own release from captivity in November.
Orit Meir, the mother of Almog Meir Jan, who was rescued on Sunday, expressed gratitude to the troops for freeing him but said: “The remaining hostages need a deal to get home safely.”