The leader of Hamas assured on Monday that the Palestinian Islamist movement is ready for sustained hostilities with the Israeli armed forces in the Gaza Strip, backed by allies in neighboring Iran, nearly a year after the war broke out.

“We are prepared to wage a long war of attrition,” stressed Yahya Sinuar.

He added that “joint efforts” with other “resistance” movements in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen would “break the will” of Israel, in a congratulatory message to Yemen’s Houthi rebels, allies of his movement, who launched a ballistic missile attack on the central part of the Israeli territory yesterday.

Fresh Israeli shelling yesterday Monday killed more than two dozen people in the small coastal enclave under siege, according to doctors and first aid workers. The Israeli military has not confirmed this account.

On the 347th day of the war, triggered by an unprecedented incursion by Hamas’ military arm into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel’s large-scale retaliatory military operations are not hitting the tiny coastal Palestinian enclave of some 2.4 million people under siege, which they have been faced with a humanitarian disaster.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday condemned the “collective punishment” of the people of the Gaza Strip, who are enduring “unimaginable” suffering.

“Obviously, we condemn all the terrorist acts of Hamas, as well as the kidnapping of hostages”, but, in any case, “the truth is that nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian population, and we see this in a dramatic way in Gaza”, he stressed during an interview he gave to Agence France-Presse.

The war has reignited tensions on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire between the Israeli armed forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement have been daily since the outbreak of the conflict and there are concerns that it is about to become general.

In the early hours of this morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that the return of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes in the north due to hostilities was now “among the goals” of the war.

Earlier on Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galand said that the possibility of a diplomatic solution to this issue is “removing”.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, for his part, stressed to the American special envoy Amos Hochstein, who visited Israel, that a “radical change” of the situation on the border is required to allow the safe return of tens of thousands of displaced Israelis.

For his part, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that for the US, finding a diplomatic solution is “the right way, the only way, to restore calm in northern Israel.”

Yesterday Hezbollah announced the death of another of its fighters by Israeli fire and claimed responsibility for more than ten attacks against military positions in northern Israel.

After months of fruitless indirect negotiations to declare a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, the US is consulting, “specifically with Egypt and Qatar”, the other two mediating countries, on the new compromise proposal that is expected to be submitted to the parties, said Mr. Miller.

“We are trying to guarantee that this proposal will allow the parties to reach a final agreement,” he insisted.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is expected in Egypt within the week to discuss it, his services at the State Department announced yesterday Monday.

According to US officials, the two main points of contention remain the so-called Philadelphia Corridor, a narrow strip of land on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt that Israel wants to keep under its control, and the details of the release of Palestinians. detained in Israeli detention centers, following new claims by Hamas.

Yesterday morning, shelling on a house killed ten people in Nuseirat, in the central part of the Gaza Strip, a hospital source said. In the same city, Al-Awda Hospital later announced that the bodies of three other people killed in another airstrike had been transferred to it.

In the Zaitoun neighborhood of Gaza City (north), six Palestinians were killed in house shelling, while two others were killed in Rafah, in the south, according to civil protection. The same source also spoke of three dead in Beit Hanoun, in the north.

“We were at home when a rocket hit the neighborhood. It was like an earthquake. Children and women were in their homes. They were killed,” said Mahmoud Abu Ful, a resident of Gaza City.

On October 7, 2023, members of the military wing of Hamas launched a raid of unprecedented ferocity from the Gaza Strip into southern Israeli territory, killing 1,205 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to a count by AFP based on official Israeli data, which includes victims killed while held hostage.

Of the 251 people abducted and taken to the enclave that day, 97 are still being held in Gaza, but 33 have been declared dead by the Israeli army.

In retaliation, Israel’s political and military leadership has vowed to wipe out Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, which it designates as a terrorist organization, as have the US and the EU in large-scale air and ground operations in the enclave. since then, at least 41,226 people have lost their lives, according to the Palestinian Islamic Movement’s Ministry of Health. Almost the entire population of 2.4 million has been displaced, in many cases more than ten times.

In Tel Aviv, protesters opposed to Mr. Netanyahu’s government demonstrated yesterday, once again, demanding a cease-fire agreement that would allow the return of the hostages who remain alive.