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Their faces contorted with pain, relatives mourned two children killed in overnight Israeli strikes on Gaza, leaning over small bodies on the pavement wrapped in sheets, one stained blood red.In the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza on Wednesday, Palestinians combed through piles of broken cement in a house flattened by an air strike, trying to salvage what they could.”We had dinner and sat down, and then it was as if Judgment Day had come. All these stones were on top of us,” Muneer Mayman told AFP in the morning, pointing to a pile of cinder blocks and concrete under which he had been found.”We lay there for more than two hours while they were removing the rubble from over us.”Behind him, men and children were at work sifting through debris, hauling off belongings wrapped in blankets for lack of bags or wheelbarrows.In south Gaza’s Khan Yunis, an elderly woman held her face between her hands as she sat by a few utensils relatives had salvaged from rubble, an AFP journalist saw.Nuseirat’s Al-Awda hospital reported at least 31 people killed in the strikes that broke the relative peace brought by a ceasefire that began on October 10.Gaza’s civil defence agency said that 101 people including 35 children were killed since the strikes began, a figure confirmed by an AFP tally of medical officials in five hospitals.- ‘What we feared most’ -Jalal Abbas, a 40-year-old displaced man living in a tent in the central city of Deir al-Balah, told AFP he fears the war will return for good.”The return of war is what we feared most. I expected the escalation and bombardment to resume because Israel always creates pretexts,” he said.”Every day they threaten to bring back the war, using the issue of the bodies as an excuse — it’s all lies,” he added.Abbas was referring to Israel’s declaration that Hamas broke the terms of the US-brokered ceasefire deal by not returning the bodies of deceased hostages quickly enough.Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday the military had launched the strikes “in response to the attack on soldiers and the blatant violation of the agreement to return the abducted missing”.At least one Israeli soldier was killed in clashes on Tuesday.In Khan Yunis, members of the civil defence, a rescue force acting under Hamas authority, had been searching by flashlight through the rubble through the night.Women wailed as the rescuers took away the bodies of deceased relatives on stretchers, before search and rescue teams moved on to the next site, a plot of land where two tents were struck.- ‘Rebuild our lives’ -In north Gaza’s Al-Shati camp too, bombardments tore through the night.”We had just started to breathe again, trying to rebuild our lives, when the bombardment came back — bringing war, explosions and death,” Khadija al-Husni, 31, told AFP.Husni also lives in a tent, having been displaced at least once like nearly all Gazans after two years of war.She deplored the ambiguity of the current ceasefire, which has been sporadically broken by Israeli air strikes or fighting with Hamas since its beginning.”Either there is a truce or a war — it can’t be both. The children couldn’t sleep; they thought the war was over,” Husni said.”Are we condemned to live in endless suffering?”

Sudan’s army-aligned government accused paramilitaries on Wednesday of attacking civilians in mosques during their recent takeover of the western city of El-Fasher, where satellite images show evidence of “continuing mass killing”, Yale researchers say.The capture of El-Fasher on Sunday after an 18-month siege marked by starvation and bombardment has solidified the Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) control over Darfur, sparking fears of ethnically motivated violence reminiscent of the region’s darkest days.El-Fasher was the last of Darfur’s five state capitals to fall to the paramilitaries, led by General Mohammad Hamdan Daglo, who have been at war with the regular army for more than two years.”More than 2,000 civilians were killed during the militia’s invasion of El-Fasher, targeting volunteers in mosques and the Red Crescent,” Mona Nour Al-Daem, humanitarian aid officer for the army-aligned government, said Wednesday at a press conference in Port Sudan.She added that the Adre border pass between Sudan and Chad has been “used to introduce weapons and equipment for the militias”.An analysis of satellite images by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab released Tuesday night “corroborates evidence of continuing mass killing in the past 48 hours since RSF took control”.”These mass killing events include corroboration of alleged executions around Saudi Hospital and a previously unreported potential mass killing at an RSF detention site at the former Children’s Hospital in eastern El-Fasher,” the group said, adding there was also ongoing “systematic killing” at one location outside the city.El-Fasher had been the last holdout in Darfur of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s forces, and its fall has left the paramilitaries in control of a vast region covering a third of Sudan, with fighting now concentrated in the Kordofan region.Since the city was captured by the RSF — descended from the Janjaweed militias accused of genocide in Darfur two decades ago — the group has again been accused of carrying out atrocities against civilians, with brutal videos circulating on social media.The United Nations has warned of “ethnically motivated violations and atrocities” while the African Union condemned “escalating violence” and “alleged war crimes”. “Civilians being targeted based on their ethnicity underscore the brutality of the Rapid Support Force,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a statement Wednesday.- Truce talks stalled -Since Sunday, more than 33,000 people have fled El-Fasher for the town of Tawila, about 70 kilometres (40 miles) to the west, which has already welcomed more than 650,000 displaced people, the UN says.Around 177,000 people remain in El-Fasher, which had a population of more than one million before the war, according to the latest figures from the world body.Satellite-based communications with El-Fasher remain cut off — though not for the RSF, which controls the Starlink network there — as are access routes to the city despite calls for humanitarian corridors.AFP images from Tawila showed displaced people, some of them with bandages, carrying their belongings and setting up temporary shelters.Sudan’s long-running war has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and triggered the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis, with both sides accused of widespread atrocities.The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said Wednesday that its two top staff in Sudan had been “designated as persona non grata” and given three days to leave the country by the foreign ministry.WFP and senior UN officials were engaging with Sudanese authorities to protest the decision, which came “at a pivotal time”, it said, noting humanitarian needs “have never been greater”.The so-called Quad group — comprising the United States, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia — has held talks over several months towards securing a truce. But those talks have reached an impasse, an official close to the negotiations said, adding that their proposals are facing “continued obstructionism” from the army-aligned government. 

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Wednesday that overnight air strikes killed at least 50 people in the Palestinian territory, as the Israeli military hit a string of targets after an attack that left a soldier dead.Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal called the strikes “a clear and flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement”, though US President Donald Trump insisted during a trip to Asia that “nothing” would jeopardise the truce he helped broker.The civil defence, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority, said 22 children were among those killed, as well as women and the elderly, and that around 200 people were wounded.”The Israeli strikes targeted tents for displaced people, homes and the vicinity of a hospital in the Strip,” Bassal told AFP.Israel began carrying out air strikes on Tuesday after accusing Hamas of attacking its troops in Gaza and violating the truce. A military official said soldier Yona Efraim Feldbaum, 37, was killed in Rafah when an engineering vehicle was hit by “enemy fire”.”A few minutes later, several anti-tank missiles were fired at another armoured vehicle belonging to the troops in the area,” the official said.Hamas said its fighters had “no connection to the shooting incident in Rafah” and reaffirmed its commitment to the US-backed ceasefire.Trump defended Israel’s response on Wednesday, but added that “nothing’s going to jeopardise” the truce.”They killed an Israeli soldier. So the Israelis hit back. And they should hit back,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during his tour of Asia.- Escalations -The territory’s main Al-Shifa hospital said one of the strikes hit its back yard.Al-Awda Hospital said it had received several bodies, including those of four children, killed in the bombing of Gaza’s central Nuseirat refugee camp.”We had just started to breathe again, trying to rebuild our lives, when the bombardment came back,” said Khadija al-Husni, who lives in a tent at a school in the Al-Shati refugee camp.”It’s a crime. Either there is a truce or a war — it can’t be both. The children couldn’t sleep; they thought the war was over.”Hamas announced it would delay handing over the body of another hostage, due on Tuesday, saying Israeli “escalation will hinder the search, excavation and recovery of the bodies”.Hamas militants took 251 people hostage during its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war.A row over the last remaining bodies of deceased hostages has threatened to derail the ceasefire agreement.Israel accuses Hamas of reneging by not returning them, but the Palestinian group says it will take time to locate remains buried in Gaza’s ruins.Hamas later said on Telegram it had found the bodies of two hostages on Tuesday, but did not specify when it would hand them over.- ‘Act decisively’ -Hamas came under mounting pressure on Monday after it returned the partial remains of a previously recovered captive, which Israel said was a breach of the truce.Hamas had said the remains were the 16th of 28 hostage bodies it had agreed to return under the ceasefire deal, which came into effect on October 10.But Israeli forensic examination determined Hamas had in fact handed over partial remains of a hostage whose body had already been brought back to Israel around two years ago, according to Netanyahu’s office.Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Bedrosian accused Hamas of staging the discovery of the remains.”Hamas dug a hole in the ground yesterday, placed the partial remains… inside of it, covered it back up with dirt, and handed it over to the Red Cross,” she told journalists.The Hostages and Missing Families Forum urged the government to “act decisively against these violations” and accused Hamas of knowing the location of the missing hostages.Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem rejected claims the group knows where the remaining bodies are, arguing that Israel’s bombardment during the two-year war had left locations unrecognisable.”The movement (Hamas) is determined to hand over the bodies of the Israeli captives as soon as possible once they are located,” he told AFP.- ‘We want to rest’ -The Palestinian militant group has already returned all 20 living hostages as agreed in the ceasefire deal.Hamas’s October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed at least 68,531 people, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.Despite the ceasefire, the toll has continued to climb as more bodies are found under the rubble.On the ground in Gaza, 40-year-old Jalal Abbas told AFP that the “return of war is what we feared most”. “I expected the escalation and bombardment to resume because Israel always creates pretexts,” he said. “Every day they threaten to bring back the war, using the issue of the bodies as an excuse.”