Doubts grow over Gaza truce plan

Doubts grew on Thursday over the fate of a Gaza truce plan that, as the week began, had raised hopes of an end to nearly seven months of war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants.

Israel was still waiting for Hamas's response to the latest proposal, said an Israeli official not authorised to speak publicly.

Mediators have proposed a deal that would halt fighting for 40 days and exchange Israeli hostages for potentially thousands of Palestinian prisoners, according to details released earlier by Britain.

Any such deal would be the first since a one-week truce in November saw 80 Israeli hostages exchanged for 240 Palestinian prisoners.

The war started with Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel estimates that 129 captives seized by militants during their attack remain in Gaza, but the military says 34 of them are dead.

Israel's retaliatory offensive, vowing to destroy Hamas, has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza — mostly women and children — including 28 over the past day, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Much of Gaza has been reduced to a grey landscape of rubble. The debris includes unexploded ordnance that leads to "more than 10 explosions every week", with more deaths and loss of limbs, Gaza's Civil Defence agency said on Thursday.

- 'Get this done' -

Humanitarians are struggling to get aid to Gaza's 2.4 million people, hundreds of thousands of whom have fled to Rafah, the territory's southernmost point, the United Nations says.

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told AFP late Wednesday that the movement's...