GAZA STRIP: Israel confirmed on Saturday that negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal had resumed in Qatar, as rescuers said more than 30 people had been killed in fresh bombardment of the territory.

The civil defense agency said a dawn air strike on the home of the Al-Ghoula family in Gaza City killed 11 people, seven of them children.

AFP images from the neighborhood of Shujaiya showed residents combing through smoking rubble. Bodies including those of small children were lined up on the ground, shrouded in white sheets.

As the violence raged, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that indirect negotiations with Hamas had resumed in Qatar for the release of hostages seized in the October 2023 attacks.

The minister told relatives of one of the hostages, woman soldier Liri Albag, that “efforts are under way to free the hostages, notably the Israeli delegation which left yesterday (Friday) for negotiations in Qatar,” his office said.

Katz said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had given “detailed instructions for the continued negotiations.”

He was speaking after Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, released a video of Albag in captivity in Gaza.

In the undated, three-and-half-minute recording that AFP has not been able to verify, the 19-year-old conscript called in Hebrew for the Israeli government to secure her release.

In response, her family issued an appeal to Netanyahu, saying: “It’s time to take decisions as if it were your own children there.”

A total of 96 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said the latest video was “firm and incontestable proof of the urgency of bringing the hostages home.”

Hamas had said late on Friday that the negotiations were poised to resume.

The militant group, whose October 7, 2023, attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war, said they would “focus on ensuring the agreement leads to a complete cessation of hostilities (and) the withdrawal of occupation forces.”

Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been engaged in months of effort that have failed to end nearly 15 months of war.

In December, Qatar expressed optimism that “momentum” was returning to the talks following the US election of Donald Trump, who takes office in 16 days.

But Hamas and Israel then accused each other of setting new conditions and obstacles.

As the clock ticks down to the handover of power in Washington, the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden notified Congress of an $8 billion arms sale to Israel, a source familiar with the plan said on Saturday.

“The department has informally notified Congress of an $8 billion proposed sale of munitions to support Israel’s long-term security by resupplying stocks of critical munitions and air defense capabilities,” the official said.

The United States is Israel’s largest military supplier.

Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the Ghoula home in Gaza City “was completely destroyed” by the dawn strike.

“It was a two-story building and several people are still under the rubble,” he said, adding Israeli drones had “also fired on ambulance staff.”

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army did not immediately comment.

“A huge explosion woke us up. Everything was shaking,” said neighbor Ahmed Mussa.

“It was home to children, women. There wasn’t anyone wanted or who posed a threat.”

Elsewhere, the civil defense agency said an Israeli strike killed five security officers tasked with accompanying aid convoys as they drove through the southern city of Khan Yunis.

The Israeli army said the five had been “implicated in terrorist activities” and were not escorting aid trucks at the time of the strike.

Rescuers said strikes elsewhere in Gaza killed 10 other people.

AFP images showed Palestine Red Crescent paramedics in Gaza City moving the body of one of their colleagues, his green jacket laid over the blanket that covered his corpse.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said a total of 136 people had been killed over the previous 48 hours.

On Sunday, the Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen in the latest of a series of attacks.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been firing missiles and drones at Israel — as well as at ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden — in what they say is a solidarity campaign with Palestinians during the war in Gaza.

The Hamas attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 45,717 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

DAMASCUS: On the slopes of Mount Qasyun which overlooks Damascus, a network of tunnels links a military complex, tasked with defending the Syrian capital, to the presidential palace facing it.
The tunnels, seen by an AFP correspondent, are among secrets of president Bashar Assad’s rule exposed since rebels toppled him on December 8.
“We entered this enormous barracks of the Republican Guard after the liberation” of Damascus sent Assad fleeing to Moscow, said Mohammad Abu Salim, a military official from Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the dominant Islamist group in the alliance that overthrew Assad.
“We found a vast network of tunnels which lead to the presidential palace” on a neighboring hill, Salim said.
During Assad’s rule, Qasyun was off limits to the people of Damascus because it was an ideal location for snipers — the great view includes the presidential palaces and other government buildings.
It was also from this mountain that artillery units for years pounded rebel-held areas at the gates of the capital.
An AFP correspondent entered the Guard complex of two bunkers containing vast rooms reserved for its soldiers. The bunkers were equipped with telecommunications gear, electricity, a ventilation system and weapons supplies.
Other simpler tunnels were dug out of the rock to hold ammunition.
Despite such elaborate facilities, Syria’s army collapsed, with troops abandoning tanks and other gear as rebels advanced from their northern stronghold to the capital in less than two weeks,.
On the grounds of the Guard complex a statue of the president’s brother Bassel Assad, atop a horse, has been toppled and Bassel’s head severed.
Bassel Assad died in a 1994 road accident. He had been the presumed successor to his father Hafez Assad who set up the paranoid, secretive, repressive system of government that Bashar inherited when his father died in 2000.
In the immense Guard camp now, former rebel fighters use pictures of Bashar Assad and his father for target practice.
Tanks and heavy weapons still sit under arched stone shelters.
Resembling a macabre outdoor art installation, large empty rusted barrels with attached fins pointing skyward are lined up on the ground, their explosives further away.
“The regime used these barrels to bomb civilians in the north of Syria,” Abu Salim said.
The United Nations denounced Bashar’s use of such weapons dropped from helicopters or airplanes against civilian areas held by Assad’s opponents during Syria’s years-long civil war that began in 2011.