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killed three others in Rafah. At the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, relatives of those killed in Maghazi camp arrived to say farewell to their loved ones before burials.

“Suddenly we heard them saying that they (Zionists) struck the building, they struck the building, we started calling them on their mobile phone but no one was answering, then we called the neighbors and they told us that the building has been struck, the missile fell inside our son’s house,” said Palestinian woman Umm Mohamed Thabet. She said her daughter and her daughter-in-law had been killed, along with her 12- and five-year-old grandsons and a granddaughter, whose twin survived. “Those who are inside the house, look who they are, women and children, these are their targets.”

Later on Tuesday, a Zionist air strike killed five Palestinians, including three children, in Khan Younis, medics said. More than 40,400 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry, mostly women and children. The crowded enclave has been laid to waste and most of its 2.3 million people have been displaced multiple times and face acute shortages of food and medicine, humanitarian agencies say.

Meanwhile, Zionist settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem, while five others were killed in a Zionist strike on the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarem, the Palestinian health ministry said. Palestinians regularly accuse Zionist security forces of standing by and allowing groups of violent settlers to attack their houses and villages and the incidents have attracted increasing concern internationally.

On Monday, United Nations aid operations in Gaza ground to a halt after the Zionist entity issued new evacuation orders on Sunday for Deir Al-Balah, where the UN operations center was located, a senior UN official said. The evacuation order came as the UN has been preparing a campaign to vaccinate an estimated 640,000 children in Gaza against polio, after at least one case of the disease was identified.

As the fighting continued, negotiators in Cairo continued meetings aimed at halting the fighting and bringing 109 Zionist and foreign captives home in an exchange deal for Palestinian prisoners. Although there has been optimism from the United States, which is supporting the talks along with Egypt and Qatar, Hamas and the Zionist entity have been trading blame for a lack of progress.

Among the main sticking points has been the Zionist entity’s insistence on maintaining control over the so-called Philadelphi corridor on the border with Egypt, which the Zionist entity says has been used as one of the main routes for smuggling weapons into Gaza. The Zionist entity has also insisted on checks on people moving from southern and central Gaza into northern areas across the Netzarim corridor, running across the center of the Gaza Strip, saying it needs to ensure armed fighters cannot move north. - Agencies