The Israeli army said Tuesday that 24 soldiers were killed in Gaza the day before, the biggest single-day toll since the start of its ground operation on October 27.
Most of the soldiers were killed when rocket-propelled grenade fire hit a tank and a building they were trying to blow up, military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement. Hagari said several of the troops killed were reservists.
“We worked to find the victims until the last hours,” Hagari said, indicating the difficulty in extracting bodies buried under the rubble. “Our reservists sacrificed what was dearest to them so that we could all live here in complete safety,” he said.
Relatives of the captives stormed a parliamentary committee meeting on Monday demanding urgent action.
“You sit here while our children are dying over there,” yelled Gilad Korngold, father of hostage Tal Shoham, an AFP correspondent reported.
US news outlet Axios reported on Monday night that Israel had proposed to Hamas, via Qatari and Egyptian mediators, a new deal to free all the captives.
The report, citing unnamed Israeli officials, said the proposed deal would be carried out in multiple stages, and would also involve the release of an undetermined number of Palestinian prisoners.
Yemen’s Houthi fighters announced on Tuesday that they had fired missiles at a US military ship in the Gulf of Aden near the Red Sea, but a US defence official said no attack had taken place.
The United States and Britain later announced a fresh round of strikes on Houthi targets in response to the rebels’ continued attacks on Red Sea shipping.
The US Central Command said in a statement that the targets of the strikes “included missile systems and launchers, air defense systems, radars, and deeply buried weapons storage facilities”.—Agencies
