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CAIRO: Israeli planes and tanks kept bombarding eastern areas of Gaza City overnight, killing at least 11 people, witnesses and medics said on Tuesday, with Hamas leader Khalil Al-Hayya due in Cairo for talks to revive a US-backed ceasefire plan.

The latest round of indirect talks in Qatar ended in deadlock in late July with Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas trading blame over the lack of progress on a US proposal for a 60-day truce and hostage release deal.

Israel has since said it will launch a new offensive and seize control of Gaza City, which it captured shortly after the war’s outbreak in October 2023 before pulling out. Militants regrouped and have waged largely guerrilla-style war since then.

It is unclear how long a new Israeli military incursion into the sprawling city in north Gaza, now widely reduced to rubble, could last or how it would differ from the earlier operation.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to expand military control over Gaza, expected to be launched in October, has increased a global outcry over the widespread devastation of the territory and a hunger crisis spreading among Gaza’s largely homeless population of over two million.

It has also stirred criticism in Israel, with the military chief of staff warning it could endanger surviving hostages and prove a death trap for Israeli soldiers. It has also raised fears of further displacement and hardship among the estimated one million Palestinians in the Gaza City region.

Witnesses and medics said Israeli planes and tanks pounded eastern districts of Gaza City again overnight, killing seven people in two houses in the Zeitoun suburb and four in an apartment building in the city center.

In the south of the enclave, five people including a couple and their child were killed by an Israeli airstrike on a house in the city of Khan Younis and four by a strike on a tent encampment in nearby, coastal Mawasi, medics said.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports and that its forces take precautions to mitigate civilian harm. Separately, it said on Tuesday that its forces had killed dozens of militants in north Gaza over the past month and destroyed more tunnels used by militants in the area.

More deaths from starvation, malnutrition

Five more people, including two children, have died of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza in the past 24 hours, the territory’s health ministry said. The new deaths raised the number of deaths from the same causes to 227, including 103 children, since the war started, it added.

Israel disputes the malnutrition fatality figures reported by the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave.

The war began on October 7, 2023 when Hamas-led militants stormed over the border into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli figures, in the country’s worst ever security lapse.

Israel’s ground and air war against the Islamist Hamas in Gaza since then has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, left much of the enclave in ruins and wrought a humanitarian disaster with grave shortages of food, drinking water and safe shelter.

Netanyahu, whose far-right ultranationalist coalition allies want an outright Israeli takeover and re-settlement of Gaza, has vowed the war will not end until Hamas is eradicated.

A Palestinian official with knowledge of the ceasefire talks said Hamas was prepared to return to the negotiating table.

However, the gaps between the sides appear to remain wide on key issues including the extent of any Israeli military withdrawal and demands for Hamas to disarm, which it has ruled out before a Palestinian state is established.

An Arab diplomat said mediators Egypt and Qatar have not given up on reviving the negotiations and that Israel’s decision to announce its new Gaza City offensive plan may not be a bluff but served to bring Hamas back to the negotiating table.

TAWILA: In the cholera-stricken refugee camps of western Sudan, every second is infected by fear. Faster than a person can boil water over an open flame, the flies descend and everything is contaminated once more.
Cholera is ripping through the camps of Tawila in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of people have been left with nothing but the water they can boil, to serve as both disinfectant and medicine.
“We mix lemon in the water when we have it and drink it as medicine,” said Mona Ibrahim, who has been living for two months in a hastily-erected camp in Tawila.
“We have no other choice,” she told AFP, seated on the bare ground.
Adam is one of nearly half a million people who sought shelter in and around Tawila, from the nearby besieged city of El-Fasher and the Zamzam displacement camp in April, following attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with Sudan’s regular army since April 2023.
The first cholera cases in Tawila were detected in early June in the village of Tabit, about 25 kilometers south, said Sylvain Penicaud, a project coordinator for French charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
“After two weeks, we started identifying cases directly in Tawila, particularly in the town’s displacement camps,” he told AFP.
In the past month, more than 1,500 cases have been treated in Tawila alone, he said, while the UN’s children agency says around 300 of the town’s children have contracted the disease since April.
Across North Darfur state, more than 640,000 children under the age of five are at risk, according to UNICEF.
By July 30, there were 2,140 infections and at least 80 deaths across Darfur, UN figures show.
Cholera is a highly contagious bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and spreads through contaminated water and food.
Causing rapid dehydration, it can kill within hours if left untreated, yet it is preventable and usually easily treatable with oral rehydration solutions.
More severe cases require intravenous fluids and antibiotics.
Ibrahim Adam Mohamed Abdallah, UNICEF’s executive director in Tawila, told AFP his team “advises people to wash their hands with soap, clean the blankets and tarps provided to them and how to use clean water.”
But in the makeshift shelters of Tawila, patched together from thin branches, scraps of plastic and bundles of straw, even those meagre precautions are out of reach.
Insects cluster on every barely washed bowl, buzzing over the scraps of already meagre meals.
Haloum Ahmed, who has been suffering from severe diarrhea for three days, said “there are so many flies where we live.”
Water is often fetched from nearby natural sources — often contaminated — or from one of the few remaining shallow, functional wells.
It “is extremely worrying,” said MSF’s Penicaud, but “those people have no (other) choice.”
Sitting beside a heap of unwashed clothes on the dusty ground, Ibrahim said no one around “has any soap.”
“We don’t have toilets — the children relieve themselves in the open,” she added.
“We don’t have food. We don’t have pots. No blankets — nothing at all,” said Fatna Essa, another 50-year-old displaced woman in Tawila.
The UN has repeatedly warned of food insecurity in Tawila, where aid has trickled in, but nowhere near enough to feed the hundreds of thousands who go hungry.
Sudan’s conflict, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises, according to the United Nations.
In Tawila, health workers are trying to contain the cholera outbreak — but resources are stretched thin.
MSF has opened a 160-bed cholera treatment center in Tawila, with plans to expand to 200 beds.
A second unit has also been set up in Daba Nyra, one of the most severely affected camps. But both are already overwhelmed, said Penicaud.
Meanwhile, aid convoys remain largely paralyzed by the fighting and humanitarian access has nearly ground to a halt.
Armed groups — particularly the RSF — have blocked convoys from reaching those in need.
Meanwhile, the rainy season, which peaks this month, may bring floodwaters that further contaminate water supplies and worsen the crisis.
Any flooding could “heighten the threat of disease outbreaks,” warned UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
The World Health Organization said last week that cholera “has swept across Sudan, with all states reporting outbreaks.” It said nearly 100,000 cases had been reported across the country since July 2024.
UNICEF also reported over 2,408 deaths across 17 of Sudan’s 18 states since August 2024.