After Lebanon truce, Israel steps up relentless bombing in besieged Gaza

Israeli military strikes killed at least 21 Palestinians across Gaza, medics have said, as forces stepped up their bombardment of central areas and tanks pushed deeper into the north and south of the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The escalation came a day after on Thursday, Israel's war on Lebanon was halted after a ceasefire, stopping more than a year of hostilities and raising hopes among many Palestinians in Gaza for a similar deal.

Israel's brutal war has laid waste to the Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people.

"I hope a ceasefire will happen like it did in Lebanon. I just want to take my children to see my land, my house, to see what they did to us, I want to live in safety," said Amal Abu Hmeid, a displaced woman in Gaza.

"God willing we will have a truce," she said, sitting in the courtyard of a school sheltering displaced families in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza.

The courtyard was filled with dirt and water streamed in from where people did their laundry. Clothes were airing outside classrooms as children played nearby.

"(Life) was beautiful (before the war). Now there is nothing beautiful, it's all gone. Our houses are gone, our brothers are gone, and no one is left. Now we hardly get one meal a day. We can’t even get bread," Abu Hmeid told Reuters.

Announcing the Lebanon accord on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said he would now renew his push for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, urging Israel and Hamas to seize the moment.

Months of efforts to negotiate a ceasefire have yielded scant progress, and negotiations are now on hold.

Israeli strikes

Israel's brutal military offensive in Gaza has killed nearly 44,200 people and displaced roughly all the enclave's population at least once, Gaza officials say. Vast swathes of the territory are in ruins.

On Thursday, six people were killed in two separate air strikes on a house and near the hospital of Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. In contrast, four others were killed when an Israeli strike hit a motorcycle in Khan Younis in the south, medics said.

In Nuseirat, one of Gaza's eight historic refugee camps, Israeli planes carried out several air strikes, destroying a multi-storey building and hitting roads outside mosques. At least 11 people were killed in those strikes, according to health officials at al-Awda Hospital in the camp.

They said in a statement that dozens of families were trapped in their homes after some tanks advanced from the northern area of the camp and that ambulance vehicles were unable to reach them because of continued tank fire.

Contacted by Reuters, the Israeli military said its forces were continuing to "strike targets as part of the operational activity in Gaza".

In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, tanks pushed deeper into the northwest area of the city, residents said.