At least 17 Palestinians killed in Israeli strike in central Gaza, health officials say

CAIRO/GAZA Aug 17 (Reuters) - At least 17 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike in the Gaza town of Zawayda on Saturday, health officials said, as Israel issued new evacuation orders, citing Hamas rocket fire nearby.

Most of the people killed were from the same family and they included eight children and four women, according to health officials in the Hamas-administered enclave.

"They were asleep in their beds, kids and babies, then three missiles targeted their place," said Abu Ahmed Hassan, a neighbour. The owner of the house was a known merchant, he said. "There are no military activities here at all," he added.

The Israeli military said in response it had struck militant targets in an area from which rockets had been fired at its troops, adding the incident was under review.

Israel's military spokesperson posted instructions in Arabic on X on Saturday for people in parts of central Gaza, including in the Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.

He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.

Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there had received the military's instructions. Residents said thousands were streaming out of Maghazi.

On Friday, two sections of the southern city of Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military, which ordered people to evacuate them, saying militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday's orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.

"This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called 'humanitarian area' to about 41 square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip," an OCHA report said.

In the central part of the enclave, residents said Israeli tanks advanced further on Saturday into the eastern area of Deir Al-Balah, an area they had not invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

The Israeli military said that since Friday its forces had killed dozens of militants, including some who had fired rockets from central and southern Gaza.

Most of Gaza's 2.3 million population has been displaced by the 10-month-old Israeli offensive, which has laid waste to much of the enclave.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to land in Israel on Sunday and meet Netanyahu on Monday, as diplomatic efforts to conclude a deal to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas and free the remaining Israeli hostages ramp up.

Meanwhile ceasefire talks in Doha, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, are due to resume next week.

Israel's negotiating team expressed "cautious optimism" on the possibility of advancing a deal, according to a statement on Saturday from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office.

"The team expressed cautious optimism regarding the possibility of progress on the deal in accordance with the updated American proposal (based on the May 27th framework), including components acceptable to Israel," the statement read.

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday following two days of Doha talks that efforts to reach a deal were now in sight, although he warned that negotiations were "far from over".

Hamas said in response that claims of a deal being close were "deceptive", and that Israel had yet to agree to the July 2 ceasefire proposal which the group had accepted.

The war was triggered on Oct. 7 when the militant Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel's subsequent military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health authorities. Israel has lost 331 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian dead are fighters.