GAZA CITY: A hospital in Gaza said it had received the bodies of eight people killed when a police vehicle was hit by an Israeli strike in the centre of the territory on Sunday.
The strike came as a Hamas delegation was due to meet with Egyptian officials in Cairo, according to a source from the Palestinian Islamist movement, and as Gaza’s civil defence agency reported another four people killed in an earlier Israeli strike.
When asked by AFP about both incidents, the Israeli military said it was looking into the reports.
The Al-Aqsa hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah said in a statement that “eight martyrs arrived as a result of the targeting of a police vehicle in the town of Zawaida in the central Gaza Strip”.
Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry confirmed the toll, saying all those killed were policemen, including the head of police in the central governorate, Colonel Iyad Abu Yousef.
Violence has continued in the war-shattered Palestinian territory despite a ceasefire which came into effect on October 10, with both Israel and Hamas regularly accusing the other of violations.
Earlier on Sunday, Gaza’s civil defence agency — which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority — said an Israeli strike killed four people in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the centre of the territory.
In a statement, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem condemned the bombing as “a blatant violation of the ceasefire agreement”.
The latest deaths came as a Hamas source told AFP that a delegation in Cairo had met with Bulgarian politician Nickolay Mladenov, named high representative for Gaza under US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
The board was established after the Trump administration, with longtime mediators Qatar and Egypt, negotiated a ceasefire to halt two years of devastating war in Gaza.
The Cairo delegation, headed by Hamas official Nizar Rayyan, “demanded an immediate halt to all violations and called on Israel to implement the second phase of the ceasefire agreement and open the Gaza crossings”, the source said.
At the start of the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Israel announced the closure of all crossing points into Gaza as a “security” measure, including Rafah on the border between the Palestinian territory and Egypt.
It has since reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing in the territory’s south to allow for the “gradual entry of humanitarian aid”.
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