Fierce battles in Gaza after Jordan attack kills 3 US troops

GAZA CITY: Deadly fighting and air strikes rocked besieged Gaza on Monday, a day after an attack that killed three US troops in Jordan heightened fears of a wider regional conflict.

Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip killed 140 people overnight, including 20 members of one family, said the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.

The Israeli army, in its war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack, said its troops had “encountered and killed dozens of armed terrorists in battles in central Gaza”.

Ground forces backed by tanks have focused combat operations on the coastal strip’s main southern city of Khan Yunis, the hometown of Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar. The almost four-month-old war was sparked by the Hamas attack which resulted in about 1,140 deaths, mostly civilians, in southern Israel, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

Militants of Hamas, considered a “terrorist” group by the United States and European Union, also seized 250 hostages, of whom Israel says around 132 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 28 dead captives.

Israel’s relentless military offensive has since killed at least 26,422 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry. In the latest efforts to broker a new ceasefire, CIA chief William Burns met top Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials in Paris on Sunday, but no breakthrough was reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the talks were “constructive” but pointed to “significant gaps which the parties will continue to discuss this week”.

US President Joe Biden sent Burns to try to negotiate the release of remaining hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, a security source has confirmed to the agency.

The New York Times reported Saturday that the negotiators were discussing a deal under which Israel would suspend the war for about two months in return for the release of over 100 hostages.

Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, Israel and its top ally the United States have faced attacks from, and struck back at, multiple Iran-backed armed groups with violence flaring in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel have traded near daily cross-border fire, and Yemen’s Huthi

rebels have launched attacks on Red Sea shipping, sparking US and British strikes on their bases.