WRAPUP 5-US and Europe embark on new diplomatic drive to stop Gaza war escalating

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Europe's top diplomat Josep Borrell began a new diplomatic push on Friday to quell the spillover of the Gaza war into Israeli-occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Red Sea shipping lanes. Their visits to the Middle East came almost three months since Hamas militants from Gaza attacked Israel, triggering a retaliatory offensive that Palestinian officials say has killed 22,600 people and devastated the enclave.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Europe's top diplomat Josep Borrell began a new diplomatic push on Friday to quell the spillover of the Gaza war into Israeli-occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Red Sea shipping lanes.

Their visits to the Middle East came almost three months since Hamas militants from Gaza attacked Israel, triggering a retaliatory offensive that Palestinian officials say has killed 22,600 people and devastated the enclave. Israel, which says it has killed 8,000 militants since the deaths of 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, has announced a more targeted approach under global pressure to limit civilian casualties.

But Gazans said Israeli planes and tanks had intensified attacks overnight on densely populated Al-Maghazi, Al-Bureij and Al-Nusseirat in the centre of the coastal strip. Some 162 people were killed in the past 24 hours, Palestinian officials said.

Four others were killed in an air strike on a street in Al-Nusseirat, they said, while further south, where hundreds of thousands of Gazans have moved on Israeli warnings, six were killed in a strike on Khan Younis. "The Israeli government claims democracy and humanity, but is inhumane," Abdel Razek Abu Sinjar said as he cried over the shrouded bodies of his wife and children, killed in a Thursday strike on his house in Rafah on the border with Egypt.

Shelling had renewed near the Al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, the Palestinian Red Crescent said. Aid agency MSF said its workers were cornered in southern Gaza and hindered from providing desperately needed help. In Jabalia in northern Gaza, which has been heavily bombed, people picked their way through ruined streets filled with sewage and garbage, video showed. Hunger and deadly diseases are spreading.

WEST BANK DEATHS MOUNT TOO Israel's humanitarian liaison office COGAT said the humanitarian situation was stabilising and denied blocking water purifiers, medical supplies and tent poles as stated by sources in Gaza and in an Egyptian Red Crescent document.

The military said it had struck more than 100 targets in Gaza in the past 24 hours, killing gunmen who tried to attack a tank in Al-Bureij and others in Khan Younis, where Hamas' military wing said it had killed some troops. Israel twice sounded sirens warning of incoming rockets in communities around Gaza but there were no reports of casualties.

The war in Hamas-run Gaza has stoked violence in the West Bank, which is governed by its rival Fatah and is another territory where Palestinian hopes for statehood have been dashed since the last U.S.-mediated talks on a solution to the decades-long conflict in 2014. The Palestinian health ministry said a 17-year-old was killed and four other Palestinians wounded by Israeli army gunfire in the West Bank town of Beit Rima. Israel's military said troops shot at Palestinians who threw petrol bombs at them.

Some 300 Palestinians have died there since the war erupted, the United Nations says. Blinken is due to visit the West Bank during a week-long tour starting on Friday in Turkey, which has offered to mediate. He will also visit Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and make a stop in Greece.

"It is in no one's interest, not Israel's, not the region's, not the world's, for this conflict to spread beyond Gaza," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. "We don't expect every conversation on this trip to be easy." Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, was due in Lebanon on Friday to discuss the situation at the Israeli border.

IRANIAN BACKING Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, is backed by Iran. Other Iranian-backed militants have hit U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and struck Israel from Lebanon in what they call revenge for Israel's avowed attempt to eliminate the Palestinian Islamist movement.

The U.S. offered up to $10 million for information on Hamas sponsors or anything leading to the disruption of the group's financial mechanisms. The leader of Lebanon's powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, said on Friday the militia had conducted around 670 military operations on the border with Israel since Oct. 8, destroying many Israeli military vehicles.

The Iran-aligned Houthis who control much of Yemen have fired on commercial vessels in the Red Sea since Nov. 19, forcing them to take longer routes in a blow to global trade. Israel has listed 175 soldiers as killed in action since its offensive began.

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said the next phase would include raids in the north to demolish tunnels and a focus in the south on rescuing some 132 Israeli hostages remaining of some 240 abducted on Oct. 7. A 25th hostage had been declared dead, a government spokesperson said on Friday.

"Netanyahu does not care if all the hostages are killed, his own brother Yonatan was killed in a failed operation to release hostages," Hamas' military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement, referring to the Israeli prime minister's commando brother's death in the raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. The World Health Organization said hospitals and other medical infrastructure in Gaza have been attacked nearly 600 times since the conflict erupted. Some 613 people have died within facilities and more than 770 wounded, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)