• CIA director says more detailed ceasefire proposal due in days
• Strikes across Gaza Strip kill 61 Palestinians

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday Islamic countries should form an alliance against what he called “the growing threat of expansionism” from Israel, as military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 61 people over the last 48 hours.

Erdogan made the comment after describing what Palestinian and Turkish officials said was the killing by Israeli troops of a Turkish-American woman taking part in a protest on Friday against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said at an Islamic schools’ association event near Istanbul.

He said recent steps that Turkiye has taken to improve ties with Egypt and Syria are aimed at “forming a line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism,” which he said also threatened Lebanon and Syria.

Israel’s military said after Friday’s incident that it was looking into reports that a female foreign national “was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.

61 killed in Gaza

Meanwhile, Israeli military strikes across the Palestinian Gaza Strip killed at least 61 people in the space of 48 hours, local medics said on Saturday.

Eleven months into the war, numerous rounds of diplomacy have so far failed to clinch a ceasefire deal to end the conflict and bring the release of Israeli and foreign prisoners held in Gaza as well as many Palestinians jailed in Israel.

An Israeli airstrike in on the Halima al-Sa’diyya school compound serving as a shelter for displaced people in the Jabalia urban refugee camp killed at least eight people and wounded 15 others, medics said.

Five more people were killed in a strike on a house in Gaza City. Later, an Israeli strike killed four people and wounded 25 others at Amr Ibn Ala’as school, which also houses displaced families in the Sheikh Radwan suburb of Gaza City, Palestinian medics said.

The Israeli military said the air strike targeted a command centre in the compound that had previously served as a school. Palestinian health officials said Israeli strikes had killed so far 28 people across the Gaza Strip on Saturday.

The armed wings of the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah groups said they had fought Israeli troops in Gaza City, in central areas and in the south with anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs, and in some incidents detonated bombs to target tanks and other army vehicles.

‘More detailed proposal’

The two warring sides continued to blame one another for the failure of mediators, including Qatar, Egypt and the United States, to broker a ceasefire. The US is preparing to present a new proposal, but the prospects of a breakthrough appear dim as gaps between the sides remain large.

CIA Director William Burns, the chief US negotiator, told an event in London that a more detailed proposal would be made in the coming days.

“We will make this more detailed proposal, I hope in the next several days, and then we’ll see,” said Burns, speaking at a Financial Times event in London alongside Richard Moore, head of Britain’s MI6 foreign spy agency, in an unprecedented joint public appearance.

Burns added that it was a question of political will and he hoped leaders on both sides recognised “the time has come finally to make some hard choices and some difficult compromises”.

He said 90 per cent of the paragraphs had been agreed but the last 10pc were always the hardest. “My hope is that you know, they’ll recognise what’s at stake here and be willing to move ahead on that basis,” he said.

On Saturday, senior Hamas official Hossam Badran said the group had made no new demands and remained committed to a July 2 proposal put forward by the United States, accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of attaching new conditions that would not end the war.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2024