GAZA – Israel pounded the Gaza Strip on Sunday (5), killing at least 23 people according to rescuers, nearly 15 months into the war with Hamas Palestinian militants.

The latest deaths come after Israel late on Saturday (4) said indirect negotiations had resumed in Qatar for a truce and hostage release deal.

An air strike on a house in northern Gaza’s Sheikh Radwan area killed at least 11 people early Sunday, according to Civil Defence Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal. He said the victims included women and children.

“Rescuers are still searching for five people trapped under the rubble of the house,” he said, adding his crew members were using “bare hands” in the effort.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck more than 100 “terror targets” in Gaza over the past two days, marking an apparent escalation in its assault.

The Hamas-run territory’s health ministry said a total of 88 people were killed over the previous 24 hours.

In one strike, five people died when the house of the Abu Jarbou family was struck in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, rescuers said.

AFP footage from another strike, on Bureij camp near Nuseirat, showed rescuers transporting bodies and injured people to a hospital.

In one scene, a medic attempted to resuscitate a wounded man inside an ambulance, while another carried an injured child to the hospital.

Relatives cried over the bodies of two men wrapped in white shrouds, the images showed.

– Strikes against rocket fire –

Several of the strikes targeted sites from which militants had been firing projectiles into Israel in recent days, the military said.

The military separately announced that its forces had killed a militant commander in close combat in northern Gaza last week.

It said the slain man was a member of militant group Islamic Jihad’s rocket array and had participated in the October 7, 2023 attack that triggered the war.

Last week, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz warned of intensified strikes if the incoming rocket fire continued.

The renewed fire in recent days triggered air raid sirens in Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip that were largely destroyed during the Hamas attack last year.

Rocket fire had become less frequent as the war dragged on but has recently intensified, as Israel pressed a major land and air offensive in the territory’s north since early October.

Both warring sides meanwhile said indirect negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal were to resume in Qatar.

Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States have tried for months to strike a deal to end the war. The latest effort comes just days before Donald Trump takes office as president of the United States on January 20.

“Efforts are underway to free the hostages,” Katz told relatives of a hostage on Saturday, according to his office.

His comments followed the release of a video by Hamas showing a teenage Israeli soldier, Liri Albag, in which she called on the Israeli government to secure her release.

AFP has not been able to verify the footage.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, in an interview with RTL radio, said that “we continue to exert the necessary pressure” to reach a deal.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t depend only on us.”

– Warning to Hezbollah –

Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli data.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed 45,805 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

Far from Gaza, Israel and Lebanese group Hezbollah have traded accusations of violating a ceasefire that ended their war, which had followed cross-border clashes initiated by Hezbollah last year in support of Palestinian ally Hamas.

Israel’s Katz said Hezbollah had still not withdrawn “beyond the Litani River” in southern Lebanon, as stipulated in the ceasefire deal that halted the fighting on November 27.

“If this condition is not met, there will be no agreement and Israel will be forced to act on its own to ensure the safe return of residents of the north to their homes,” Katz said.

On Saturday, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem accused Israel of violating the ceasefire agreement, which the United States and France help to monitor.

Qassem said Hezbollah was prepared to act even before the expiry of a 60-day deadline for Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon.

Nearly two weeks ago, UN peacekeepers and Lebanon’s prime minister called on Israel’s army to speed up its withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

-Agence France-Presse