DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than 45,000 Palestinians have now been killed in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas militants, health officials in the embattled territory said Monday, as often-stalled ceasefire negotiations appeared to be gaining ground.

Qatar, Egypt and the United States have renewed efforts to broker a ceasefire deal in recent days, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Monday he believed negotiators are closer to a deal than at any time since the only previous truce, a week-long pause in November 2023 that saw 105 hostages released.

“We all estimate that an opportunity is being created following Hamas’s need to become more flexible, and I really hope we can advance to a practical stage in this process,” Katz said ahead of a closed-door session of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a key Hamas ally, agreed to a ceasefire late last month.

Palestinian health officials updated the Gaza death toll to 45,028. They said 106,962 others have been wounded since the war began, and warned that the true toll is higher because thousands of bodies are buried under rubble or in areas that medics cannot access.

The ministry's count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it has said more than half of the fatalities are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.

The war is by far the deadliest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, with the death toll amounting to roughly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population of about 2.3 million.

A family dies as another airstrike hits a shelter

More than 50 dead were brought to hospitals across the bombed-out territory over the past 24 hours, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.

Among the latest killed were 10 people, including a family of four, in an overnight Israeli strike in Gaza City's eastern Shijaiyah neighborhood, Palestinian medics said.

Israel claims Hamas is responsible for the civilian death toll because it operates from within civilian areas in the densely populated Gaza Strip. Rights groups and Palestinians say Israel has failed to take sufficient precautions to avoid civilian deaths.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Israel responded by heavy bombardment and a ground incursion into the Palestinian enclave. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third believed to be dead. Most of the rest were released during a ceasefire last year.

A separate strike on a school on Sunday in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 13 people, including six children and two women, according to Nasser Hospital, where the bodies were taken. The hospital initially reported the strike had killed 16 but later said three bodies had been from a separate strike.

Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians, said she met with children injured in Sunday’s strike. They included a 17-year-old girl with a severe leg injury and shrapnel wounds.

She survived along with her twin sister and three other sisters, Wateridge said, but their mother was killed. Wateridge said one sister described “how their mother’s bones were crushed under the rubble. There was nothing they could do to save her.”

The Israeli military said it had struck Hamas fighters operating inside a command center embedded in a compound that had served as a school in Khan Younis. It did not provide evidence.

A Palestinian journalist is mourned

In central Gaza's Nuseirat urban refugee camp, mourners gathered for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network who was killed Sunday in a strike that hit Gaza's civil defense agency. They carried his body through the streets, along with his bulletproof vest.

Al Jazeera said Ahmad Baker Al-Louh, 39, had been covering rescue operations of a family wounded in an earlier bombing when he was killed.

The strike also killed three civil defense workers, including the local head of the agency, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The civil defense is Gaza’s main rescue agency and operates under the Hamas-run government.

The International Federation of Journalists said last week that 104 journalists and media workers have been killed in 2024, with more than half dying in Gaza.

The Israeli military said its strike targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in a command center embedded in the offices of the “Civil Defense” organization. It accused the journalist of having been a member of Islamic Jihad, which his colleagues in Gaza denied.

Gaza's civil defense rejected the claims that militants operated from the site.

“We were stunned by the Israeli occupation statement,” Mahmoud al-Lawh, the journalist’s cousin, told The Associated Press. “These claims are lies and misleading to cover up this crime.”

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Magdy reported from Cairo. Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem contributed.

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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war