Gaza death toll rises as Blinken returns to the Middle East


The death toll in the Gaza Strip has increased following the latest airstrikes on the Palestinian territory, where the Israeli military is working to root out the leaders of Hamas following the attack on southern Israel almost four months ago.

New figures came as United Nations official has accused Israel’s navy of striking an aid convoy carrying food destined for hard-hit northern Gaza.

The food convoy was waiting to move into northern Gaza when it was hit by Israeli naval gunfire on Monday morning, Thomas White, the Gaza director of UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said in a post on the X, formerly Twitter, platform.

Mr White posted images showing a truck parked on the roadside with damage to its cargo. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which said it was looking into the report.

Juliette Touma, head of communications at the agency UNRWA, said no one was injured in the strike, which took place north of the area of Wadi al-Balah in central Gaza.

Israeli security forces secure the site where an alleged Palestinian teenage attacker was shot outside the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, in the West Bank (Mahmoud Illean/AP)

The UN says it has struggled to send aid to war-torn northern Gaza, which Israel pummelled in the first weeks of the war, because of the ongoing fighting.

Monday’s incident came after the more than a dozen countries, including the US, announced they would suspend funding to UNRWA over Israeli allegations that 12 of its 13,000 Gaza employees participated in the October 7 attacks against Israel, which set off the war.

However, Spain’s foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, has said his government will give 3.5 million euros (£3 million) to the agency to help it maintain its activities in the short term.

On Sunday, strikes hit two houses and a mosque in central Gaza, killing 29 people and wounding at least 60 others.

Separate airstrikes in Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city, killed two children, ages 12 and two, according to the registration office at the hospital where the bodies were taken.

Israel’s military said it raided the headquarters of Hamas’s brigade in the southern city of Khan Younis and found what it called training materials for the October 7 attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

The materials included “models simulating entrance gates of Israeli kibbutzim, military bases and IDF armoured vehicles”, the military said.

The offensive in Gaza that Israel launched in response to the attack had killed 27,365 people and wounded more than 66,000 in Gaza as of Sunday morning, the Hamas-ruled territory’s Health Ministry reported.

The Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, but says most of those killed were women and children.

In the occupied West Bank Israeli police say officers shot and killed a Palestinian boy who allegedly attempted to stab them.

Police said the paramilitary border police were carrying out a routine security check in an area east of Jerusalem when a 14-year-old allegedly pulled out a knife and attempted to stab the officers. The officers opened fire, shooting the teenager, and were uninjured, police said.

The White House has urged Israel to make a greater effort to avoid harming civilians and to allow more aid into besieged Gaza.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was returning to the region this week for his fifth visit of the conflict, beginning on Monday in Saudi Arabia and with planned stops in Egypt, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank.

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