Israeli strike kills hungry Gaza family in their sleep

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA/CAIRO (Reuters) -The Al-Shaer family went to bed hungry at their home in Gaza City. An Israeli airstrike killed them in their sleep.

The family - freelance journalist Wala al-Jaabari, her husband and their five children - were among more than 100 people killed in 24 hours of Israeli strikes or gunfire, according to health officials.

Their corpses lay in white shrouds outside their bombed home on Wednesday with their names scribbled in pen. Blood seeped through the shrouds as they lay there, staining them red.

"This is my cousin. He was 10. We dug them out of the rubble," Amr al-Shaer, holding one of the bodies after retrieving it.

Iman al-Shaer, another relative who lives nearby, said the family hadn't eaten anything before the bombs came down. "The children slept without food," he said.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike at the family's home, but said its air force had struck 120 targets throughout Gaza in the past day, including "terrorist cells, military structures, tunnels, booby-trapped structures, and additional terrorist infrastructure sites".

Relatives said some neighbours were spared only because they had been out searching for food at the time of the strike.

Ten more Palestinians died overnight from starvation, the Gaza health ministry said, bringing the total number of people who have starved to death to 111, most of them in recent weeks as a wave of hunger crashes on the Palestinian enclave.

In a statement on Wednesday, 111 organisations, including Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Refugees International, said mass starvation was spreading even as tons of food, clean water and medical supplies sit untouched just outside Gaza, where aid groups are blocked from accessing them.

Israel, which cut off all supplies to Gaza from the start of March and reopened it with new restrictions in May, says it is committed to allowing in aid but must control it to prevent it from being diverted by militants. It says it has let enough food into Gaza during the war and blames Hamas for the suffering of Gaza's 2.2 million people.

Israel has also accused the United Nations of failing to act in a timely fashion, saying 700 truckloads of aid are idling inside Gaza. "It is time for them to pick it up and stop blaming Israel for the bottlenecks which are occurring," Israeli government spokesman David Mercer said on Wednesday.

The United Nations and aid groups trying to deliver food to Gaza say Israel, which controls everything that comes in and out, is choking delivery, and Israeli troops have shot hundreds of Palestinians dead close to aid collection points since May.

"We have a minimum set of requirements to be able to operate inside Gaza," Ross Smith, the director of emergencies at the U.N. World Food Programme, told Reuters. "One of the most important things I want to emphasize is that we need to have no armed actors near our distribution points, near our convoys."

FALTERING PEACE TALKS

The war between Israel and Hamas has been raging for nearly two years since Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages from southern Israel in the deadliest attack in Israel's history.

Israel has since killed nearly 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, decimated Hamas as a military force, reduced most of the territory to ruins and forced nearly the entire population to flee their homes multiple times.

U.S. Middle East peace envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to hold new ceasefire talks, travelling to Europe this week for meetings on the Gaza war and a range of other issues, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.

Talks on a proposal for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which would include the release of more of the 50 hostages still being held in Gaza, are being mediated by Qatar and Egypt with Washington's backing.

Successive rounds of negotiations have achieved no breakthrough since the collapse of a ceasefire in March.

A senior Palestinian official told Reuters Hamas might give mediators a response to the latest proposals in Doha later on Wednesday, on the condition that amendments be made to two major sticking points: details on an Israeli military withdrawal, and on how to distribute aid during a truce.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet includes far-right parties that oppose any agreement that ends without the total destruction of Hamas.

"The second I spot weakness in the prime minister and if I come to think, heaven forbid, that this is about to end with us surrendering instead of with Hamas's absolute surrender, I won’t remain (in the government) for even a single day," Finance Minister Belalel Smotrich told Army Radio.

(Reporting by Nidal al-MughrabiAdditional reporting by Crispian Balmer in JerusalemWriting by John DavisonEditing by Peter Graff)