Artillery pounding and deadly airstrikes continued on Thursday in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military announced this morning that it had recovered the bodies of five Israelis killed during a Hamas offensive in southern Israel on October 7 and had been taken to the enclave.

In Washington, after delivering a speech to the US Congress in which he defended his country’s military’s war on the Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met at the White House with President Joe Biden, then with his Vice President Kamala Harris .

Mr. Biden emphasized to his interlocutor that a cease-fire agreement in the Palestinian enclave needs to be concluded “quickly,” according to his services. Ms Harris, who expressed her “concern” for civilians in the Gaza Strip and said she would not remain “silent” in the face of “suffering”, added: “it is time to close this deal”.

The US is Israel’s main ally and arms supplier internationally, but Washington has been raising its voice of late as the civilian toll in the Palestinian enclave mounts.

The war broke out on October 7 when Hamas’s military arm launched an unprecedented raid on southern Israel that killed 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people abducted that day, 111 are still in the Gaza Strip, but 39 are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

In retaliation, Israel has vowed to wipe out the Palestinian Islamist movement, in power in the enclave since 2007, which the US and EU designate as a terrorist organization. Its wide-ranging military operations have so far killed at least 39,175 people, the majority of them civilians, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.

Yesterday’s shelling focused on Gaza City and Beit Lahia in the north, where nine people were killed, according to medical sources, as well as Al Buraij in the central part of the enclave. At the same time, ground operations continued in Khan Yunis and Rafah, in the south.

“Israeli warplanes targeted civilians near their homes,” killing at least five, said Ahmed Kahlut, director of civil protection in Beit Lahia.

According to eyewitnesses, Israeli soldiers blew up houses in Tal al-Sultan, a suburb in western Rafah, and in Bani Suhaila, east of Khan Yunis.

For their part, the Israeli armed forces announced that they “eliminated dozens of terrorists and destroyed about 50 terrorist infrastructures” in the last few days in Khan Yunis.

Thousands of Palestinians were displaced again to escape the shelling, following new orders to hastily evacuate civilians from various sectors of the enclave.

With nowhere to go, families live on the streets or, as in the case of Han Younis, take refuge in areas where cemeteries are located.

“We live next to the dead. We are as if dead. The difference is that we breathe, they don’t,” commented Rital Motlak, a displaced person, in front of her makeshift shelter.

Since the outbreak of war, the vast majority of the Gaza Strip’s 2.4 million residents have been displaced, in most cases repeatedly, into the enclave under Israeli siege.

“The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is an absolute disaster,” summed up UN chief Antonio Guterres yesterday Thursday. He spoke of “the highest number of victims and the greatest destruction” he has seen “since he became Secretary General” of the international organization, pointing out at the same time that the level of humanitarian aid is “completely disproportionate to the needs”.

Yesterday morning the Israeli army announced that during an operation in Khan Younis it recovered the bodies of five Israelis who were killed on October 7. They were a woman and two men who lived in a kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip, as well as two of its members. According to Vice Admiral Daniel Hagari, the army spokesman, they were found in tunnels “20 meters deep under the city of Khan Younis”, in an area that had been declared a “humanitarian zone”. The vice admiral accused Hamas of “taking advantage” of the situation to keep hostages there.

For its part, the Forum of Families of Homeowners, an Israeli organization representing relatives of people held in the Gaza Strip, accused the Netanyahu government and the prime minister personally of “sabotaging” efforts to conclude a ceasefire agreement, which would led to the exchange of hostages with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Ceasefire talks scheduled to take place Thursday in Qatar have been postponed until next week, a source familiar with the matter said.

Despite the “concern” in Washington about the reckoning in the ranks of civilians, Mr. Netanyahu rejected the “lies” about the victims yesterday before Congress; he did not hesitate to say that the word of the victims in the ranks of civilians to him in the ranks of wars is “the lowest in history” of wars in urban settings.

In May, the UN estimated that at least 56% of the dead since the outbreak of war in the Palestinian enclave were women and children, based on data from the Hamas Health Ministry.