Five killed in Israeli airstrikes in Rafah as troops prepare to launch ground-offensive

Israeli airstrikes have killed at least five people in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, according to Palestinan hospital officials.

The attacks were launched as troops prepare in the next few days to launch a ground-offensive on the last remaining refuge for more than a million Gazans.

In central Gaza, four people were killed in

Israeli tank shelling after Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket teams launched missiles into Israeli communities.

Battles are still raging in the strip, the war now in its seventh month, as a top Hamas official said the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more.

In Istanbul Khalil al-Hayya said Hamas would lay down its weapons and become a political party if a Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.

The West bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza were captured by Israel in the 1967 war and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’s hard-line government rejects the long-standing claim.

Whilst the international community supports such a two-state solution Netanyahu has long rejected it as a possibility.

Al-Hayya added that Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by its rival Fatah faction, to form a unified government for Gaza and the West Bank.

He said Hamas would accept "a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in accordance with the international resolutions," along Israel's pre-1967 borders.

He pledged that if that happened Hamas’s military wing would dissolve.

Referring to Israel he said: "All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting forces have turned into the national army.”

After the Hamas takeover of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority was left with administering the Israeli-occupied West Bank. War in Gaza began with the deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel in which Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Militants dragged some 250 hostages into the enclave. The ensuing Israeli bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to local health authorities.

More than 80% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million has been displaced. And Israel argues that a Rafah offensive is necessary to achieve victory over Hamas.