At least 15 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike in the Gaza town of Zawayda, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported on Saturday, as a Hamas official dismissed ceasefire optimism as an "illusion".
The senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed optimistic talk by US President Joe Biden that a Gaza truce was nearer after negotiations in the Gulf emirate of Qatar.
"To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion," Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP.
"We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats."
He was responding to Mr Biden's comment on Friday that "we are closer than we have ever been" to a ceasefire deal.
Mr Biden spoke after two days of talks in Qatar where Washington tried to bridge differences between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas, which have been at war for more than 10 months in the Gaza Strip.
Previous optimism during months of on-off truce talks has proven unfounded.
But the stakes have risen significantly since the late July killings in quick succession of Fuad Shukr, a top operations chief of Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are listed as terrorist organisations by Australia.
Their deaths prompted promises of retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah and fears of a wider Middle East war.
Negotiators are scheduled to meet again next week seeking an agreement to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas and free remaining hostages.
Strikes on southern Lebanon continue
The Israeli military said it was aware of reports of 15 people killed in a Gaza air strike and was looking into them.
Israel's military spokesperson in Arabic posted instructions on X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.
He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.
Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military's instructions.
Around 10 people were killed, including two children, and five were wounded by an Israeli strike on a residential building in the city of Nabatieh city in south Lebanon, state news agency NNA said on Saturday.
The victims were all Syrian citizens, NNA said, adding that a final toll of the strike would be announced after DNA tests were conducted to determine the identity of the victims.
The Israeli military said the air strike targeted a weapons depot used by Hezbollah militants.
Tensions have soared in the region in recent weeks, after a rocket strike blamed on Hezbollah killed 12 children and teens in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel responded with the killing of a top Hezbollah commander in the suburbs of Beirut.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, as has Iran for the killing in Tehran of the political chief of the Palestinian Hamas group, Ismail Haniyeh.
Evacuation orders in Khan Younis
On Friday, two sections in western Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military, which ordered people to evacuate them saying that militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.
"This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called 'humanitarian area' to about 41 square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip," an OCHA report said.
The conflict began after gunmen from Hamas and related groups launched a terror attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, resulting in the death of about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, by Israeli tallies, and the abduction of 251 hostages of multiple nationalities.
Israel's subsequent military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health authorities.
Most of Gaza's 2.3 million population has been displaced by the 10-month-old Israeli offensive, which has laid waste to much of the enclave.
Reuters
