GAZA: US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that progress was being made to end the Zionist-Hamas war in Gaza, as a new ceasefire push began more than 20 months since the start of the conflict. “I think great progress is being made on Gaza,” Trump told reporters ahead of a NATO summit in the Netherlands, adding that his special envoy Steve Witkoff had told him: “Gaza is very close.” He linked his optimism about imminent “very good news” to a ceasefire agreed on Tuesday between the Zionist entity and Hamas’s backer Iran to end their 12-day war.

Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also suggested that the Zionist entity’s blitz of Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities, as well as its security forces linked to overseas militant groups, could help end the Gaza conflict. Netanyahu faces growing calls from opposition politicians, relatives of captives being held in Gaza and even members of his ruling coalition to bring an end to the fighting.

Key mediator Qatar announced Tuesday that it would launch a new push for a ceasefire, with Hamas on Wednesday saying talks had stepped up.

“Our communications with the brother mediators in Egypt and Qatar have not stopped and have intensified in recent hours,” Hamas official Taher Al-Nunu told AFP. He cautioned, however, that the group had “not yet received any new proposals” to end the war.

The Zionist entity’s military campaign has killed at least 56,156 people, mostly civilians. In one of the war’s deadliest incidents for the Zionist army, it said seven of its soldiers were killed on Tuesday in southern Gaza. The latest military losses led to rare criticism of the war effort by the leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, a partner in Netanyahu’s coalition government. “I still don’t understand why we are fighting there... Soldiers are getting killed all the time,” lawmaker Moshe Gafni told a hearing in the Zionist parliament on Wednesday.

The slain soldiers were from the Zionist combat engineering corps and were conducting a reconnaissance mission in the Khan Yunis area when their vehicle was targeted with an explosive device, according to a military statement. “Yesterday afternoon, during an operational activity, an explosive device was attached to an armored Puma vehicle belonging to the brigade’s forces,” military spokesperson Effie Defrin told a briefing. “As a result, the armored vehicle caught fire. Rescue forces and helicopters were dispatched to the scene and made attempts to extract the soldiers, but were unsuccessful.”

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the main group representing relatives of captives held in Gaza, endorsed Gafni’s criticism of the war. “The war in Gaza has run its course, it is being conducted with no clear purpose and no concrete plan,” the group said in a statement.

Rights groups say Gaza and its population of more than two million face famine-like conditions due to Zionist restrictions, with near-daily deaths of people queuing for food aid. Gaza’s civil defense agency said Wednesday Zionist fire killed another 35 people, including six who were waiting for aid. Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that a crowd of aid-seekers was hit by Zionist “bullets and tank shells” in an area of central Gaza where Palestinians have gathered each night in the hope of collecting rations.

The United Nations on Tuesday condemned the “weaponization of food” in Gaza, and slammed a US- and Zionist-backed body that has largely replaced established humanitarian organizations there. The privately run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was brought into the Palestinian territory at the end of May, but its operations have been marred by chaotic scenes, deaths and neutrality concerns. The Gaza health ministry says that since late May, nearly 550 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce supplies.

In Gaza’s central Nuseirat refugee camp, a predawn strike on a house killed six people including a child, while five others were killed in another strike on houses in the central city of Deir el-Balah, Bassal said. At nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital, relatives of the people killed in Deir el-Balah sobbed over the bodies of their loved ones, laid out on the floor of a small room under plastic sheets.

“They took away (killed) the father, mother and brothers, only two girls survived. One of them is a baby girl aged one year and two months, and the other one is five years old,” one female relative, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told AFP. Another 18 people were killed in five separate strikes in and around Gaza City, in the Palestinian territory’s north, said Bassal.

The Palestinian health ministry said Zionist troops shot dead a 15-year-old boy in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, the second teenager killed in three days. “The child Rayan Tamer Houshiyeh was killed after being shot in the neck by soldiers in the town of Al-Yamoun, northwest of Jenin,” the Ramallah-based ministry said. On Monday, the health ministry announced that Zionist fire had killed a 13-year-old it identified as Ammar Hamayel in the West Bank town of Kafr Malik near Ramallah. In a similar incident in April, a teenager who held US citizenship was shot dead in the town of Turmus Ayya. – AFP