Israel, Hamas agree on new 72-hour truce

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Israel and Hamas said they have agreed a new 72-hour truce starting on Tuesday (August 5), after increasingly vocal world demands for a ceasefire in the bloody Gaza conflict.

The apparent breakthrough came during talks in Cairo on Monday, only days after a similar three-day truce collapsed in a deadly wave of violence within hours of starting on Friday.

The truce announcement came after international outrage grew over an Israeli strike near a UN school on Sunday that killed 10 people, in the third such strike in 10 days.

On the ground in Gaza, Israeli forces had largely observed the unilateral seven-hour pause in their offensive on Monday but the humanitarian window got off to a shaky start with an air strike levelling a house in a beachfront refugee camp in Gaza City, killing three people, among them a nine-year-old girl.

Gaza medics said they retrieved 32 bodies from the rubble. Hamas did not observe the truce, firing 42 rockets over the border during the pause, 24 of which hit Israel and another one which was shot down, the army said.

No place to bury the dead
Corpses of dead Palestinians have overwhelmed morgues at Rafah's hospitals, and relatives have been left with no option but to keep their loved-ones in commercial refrigerators.

At the city's Kuwaiti hospital, a stream of ambulances negotiated its way through crowds of medical staff and families, delivering bodies to be laid out on the gravel outside the building.

Many of the dead have no one to bury them except distant relatives, as Israeli air strikes on Rafah have killed several members of the same families.

"Usually in such situations, we build 500 graves, but since cement is not allowed into Gaza, we are unable to build graves," Hassan Al Saifi, deputy minister of Gaza's Waqf ministry, in charge of religions affairs, told Al Jazeera.

For now the ministry said, it is putting bodies into a temporary mass grave until the Israeli assault on Gaza ends. But the task of holding funerals has also become precarious due to Israel's shelling of the Rafah cemetery. "Where else can we bury our relatives when Israel is bombing the cemeteries?" s