Fighting raged in Gaza on Saturday for a 29th day since Hamas militants stormed across the Israeli border and, according to Israeli officials, killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and abducted more than 240 others.
Since then, Israel has relentlessly bombarded the Gaza Strip and sent in ground troops, with the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory saying 9,227 people have been killed, two-thirds of them women and children.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Jordan on Saturday for talks with counterparts from five Arab countries, after visiting Israel in his efforts to secure humanitarian “pauses” in the war.
Amman said the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as a representative of the Palestinian Authority – led by president Mahmoud Abbas, a rival of Hamas – would meet Blinken about the conflict.
The Israeli army said on Saturday its forces carried out an overnight “targeted raid” in southern Gaza, where it has struck before but rarely sent in troops.
Soldiers “operated to map out buildings and neutralise explosive devices”, the army said without specifying the location.
Israel Defense Forces said infantry and armoured vehicles attacked Hamas militants coming out of underground tunnels in the north of Gaza and killed a number of them, according to an IDF post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
It said “troops encountered a terrorist cell exiting a tunnel shaft. In response, the troops fired shells toward the terrorists and killed them.”
Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, a Hamas ally, on Friday said the United States was “entirely responsible” for the Hamas-Israel war as he broke his silence on the conflict amid concerns of a broader regional conflagration.
“America is entirely responsible for the ongoing war in Gaza and on its people, and Israel is simply a tool of execution,” Nasrallah said.
Nasrallah warned Israel against attacking Lebanon, saying the possibility of open conflict was “realistic”.
Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told the BBC that Hezbollah was unlikely to escalate the violence, saying “a broader regional conflict has been deterred”.
Hundreds of Palestinians and foreigners, including Gazans requiring urgent medical care and dual nationals, were expected to leave Gaza on Saturday for a fourth day of evacuations through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, according to a list released by the Palestinian border authority.
On Friday, a senior White House official said Hamas had tried to use a US-brokered deal on opening the Rafah crossing on humanitarian grounds to get its fighters out of Gaza.
One-third of the names on a list provided by Hamas of wounded Palestinians for evacuation were those of Hamas members and fighters, the official said.
“That was just unacceptable to Egypt, to us, to Israel,” the official added.
An Israeli strike on a Gaza ambulance convoy killed 15 people, Palestinian doctors said, spurring concerns for health workers’ safety. Israel accused Hamas of using the vehicles to transport fighters.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said one of its ambulances had been struck “by a missile fired by the Israeli forces”, about two metres (6.5 feet) from the entrance to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “horrified by the reported attack … on an ambulance convoy” and called for the fighting to stop.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg