The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today that Israel remains committed to the proposed cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and the deal to release hostages, while the chief of the Israeli National Defense General Staff stressed that Hamas forces in Rafah, the city in the southern Gaza Strip have almost dissolved.

“We are committed to the Israeli proposal that President Biden welcomed. Our position has not changed. The second thing, which does not contradict the first, is that we will not end the war until we eliminate Hamas,” Netanyahu told parliament.

For its part, the Israeli army issued a statement assessing the situation in the Rafah area, where Israeli forces are fighting the remaining battalions of Hamas.

“We are clearly approaching the point where we can say that we have dismantled the Rafah Brigade, that it has been defeated not in the sense that there are no more terrorists, but in the sense that it can no longer function as a fighting unit,” said the head of the Israeli general staff of national defense general Hertsi Halevi.

Two Israeli airstrikes targeting aid supplies killed at least 11 Palestinians in Gaza today, medics said. A strike at a food distribution center in Gaza City, near the Sati refugee camp, killed three people. Another raid, near the town of Bani Suhaila in the southern Gaza Strip, killed at least eight people, including guards escorting aid trucks, medics said.

At least 37,626 Palestinians have been killed and 86,098 wounded in Israeli strikes in the Palestinian enclave since the start of the war on October 7, according to the latest tally given today by the Hamas health ministry.