While diplomatic negotiations are underway to reach a new truce, the Israeli army this Saturday shelled Rafah, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Shortly after midnight, an AFP journalist heard powerful strikes on this city where more than a million Palestinians threatened by the war had taken refuge.
The Hamas Ministry of Health announced the deaths of at least 100 civilians overnight in the Gaza Strip, mostly women, teenagers and children.
The Israeli army, for its part, declared that it had killed “dozens of terrorists” in the north and center of the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours.
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According to witnesses, 12 people were killed in Rafah during an airstrike on a house belonging to the Hijazi family.
“They bombed without any warning,” said Bilal Jad, 45, a neighbor whose house was damaged in the attack.
“There is no safe place.
Airstrikes are happening everywhere,” he added.
More than 1.3 million Gaza residents, according to the UN, out of a total of 2.4 million, are now refugees in Rafah, a city which had some 200,000 inhabitants before the war.
The displaced people pile up near the closed border with Egypt, threatened in the middle of winter by famine and epidemics.
One of them, Abdoulkarim Misbah, said he first fled his home in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the north, to go to Khan Younès, in the south, before being displaced again: “ We escaped death in Khan Younes last week, without taking anything with us,” said this 32-year-old man.
Towards a new truce?
Faced with this major humanitarian crisis and heavy civilian losses, diplomats are working to achieve a second truce, longer than that of a week which in November allowed the release of around a hundred Israeli hostages in Gaza and of Palestinians detained by Israel.
Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh, based in Qatar, is expected in Egypt to discuss a proposal drawn up during a meeting at the end of January in Paris between CIA chief William Burns and Egyptian, Israeli and Qatari officials .
According to a Hamas source, the proposal concerns three phases, the first of which provides for a six-week truce during which Israel will have to release 200 to 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages still held in Gaza, and 200 to 300 trucks of Aid will be able to enter the small besieged territory every day.
In recent days, Qatar reported "first" signs of support for the truce from Hamas, but the Palestinian Islamist movement then claimed to have not yet made a decision on this proposal, wishing for a cease-fire. fire and not a new truce.
The proposed pause in the fighting was “approved by the Israeli side”, again according to Doha.
But Israel continues to affirm that it will only definitively end its offensive in Gaza once the Islamist movement is "eliminated", the hostages released and after having received guarantees on the future security of its territory.
The truce project must also be at the heart of a new tour of the Middle East by American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, starting on Sunday, which will take him to Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the occupied West Bank. and in Saudi Arabia.
The new French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, begins his first tour in the region on Saturday which will take him to Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.