Houthis hold mass rally for Gaza in Yemen capital

JERUSALEM: Bombing continued across Gaza on Friday as the world began to digest Israel’s first proposals for the administration of the territory after its war with Hamas, now approaching its fourth month.

With much of the Gaza Strip already reduced to rubble, airstrikes continued through the night in the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah as well as parts of central Gaza, AFP correspondents reported.
The Israeli army said its forces had “struck over 100 targets” across Gaza over the past 24 hours, including military positions, rocket launch sites, and weapons depots.
The Health Ministry in the territory said it had recorded 162 deaths over the same period.
A fighter jet bombed the central area of Bureij, killing “an armed terrorist cell,” the army said, after what it described as an attempted attack on an Israeli tank.

And “a number” of Palestinians were killed in clashes in Khan Younis, a city that has become a major battleground, the army said.
Conditions for Gaza’s civilians are precarious, with the UN estimating 1.9 million people are displaced.
AFPTV footage on Friday showed entire families, seeking safety from the violence, arriving in Rafah in overloaded cars and on foot, pushing handcarts stacked with possessions.
“We fled Jabalia camp to Maan (in Khan Younis), and now we are fleeing from Maan to Rafah,” said one woman. “(We have) no water, electricity, and food.”
A spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said that Rafah is overwhelmed by the influx.
“The city is usually home to only 250,000 people. And now, it’s more than 1.3 million,” said Adnan Abu Hasna.
Abu Mohammed, 60, who fled to Rafah from the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, said he believed the territory’s future was “dark and gloomy and very difficult.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported renewed shelling and drone fire in the area around Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis on Friday after seven displaced people, including a five-day-old baby, were killed while sheltering in the compound.
Civilian deaths have soared during the conflict, and the UN has warned of a humanitarian crisis that has left hundreds of thousands displaced, facing famine and disease.
During his visit, Blinken plans to discuss “immediate measures to increase substantially humanitarian assistance to Gaza” with Israeli leaders, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
“We don’t expect every conversation on this trip to be easy. There are tough issues facing the region and difficult choices ahead,” he added.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s plan for the “day after,” shared with the media late on Thursday but not yet adopted by Israel’s war Cabinet, says that neither Israel nor Hamas will govern Gaza and rejects future Jewish settlements there.
The minister’s outline proposals were unveiled on the eve of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s fourth trip to the region since a Hamas attack on Oct. 7 triggered the war.
Blinken arrived in Turkiye on Friday on the first leg of a tour that will also take him to Greece and several Arab states before he heads to Israel and the occupied West Bank next week.
According to Gallant’s proposals, the war will continue until Israel has dismantled Hamas’s “military and governing capabilities” and secured the return of hostages.
After Israel achieves its objectives — for which the proposal sets no timeline — Palestinian “civil committees” will begin assuming control of the territory’s governance, it said.
Israel launched its campaign against Hamas after the group’s Oct. 7 attack.
At a commemorative gathering in southern Israel on Friday, Michael Levi, 41, whose brother Or Levi was kidnapped from a music festival, said: “There’s a feeling none of us … can be safe in our own homes” since the attack.
In response, Israel has launched a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,600 people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.