US, Europe embark on new diplomatic drive to stop Gaza war escalating

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Europe's top diplomat Josep Borrell began a new diplomatic push Friday to quell the spillover of the Gaza war into Israeli-occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Red Sea shipping lanes.
Their visits to the Middle East came almost three months since Oct 7 Israeli aggression against Gaza that Palestinian officials say has killed 22,600 people and devastated the enclave.
Gazans said Israeli planes and tanks had intensified attacks overnight on densely populated Al-Maghazi, Al-Bureij and Al-Nusseirat in the centre of the coastal strip.
Some 162 people were killed in the past 24 hours, Palestinian officials said.
Four others were killed in an air strike on a street in Al-Nusseirat, they said, while further south, where hundreds of thousands of Gazans have moved on Israeli warnings, six were killed in a strike on Khan Younis.
"The Israeli government claims democracy and humanity, but is inhumane," Abdel Razek Abu Sinjar said as he cried over the shrouded bodies of his wife and children, killed in a Thursday strike on his house in Rafah on the border with Egypt.
Shelling had renewed near the Al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, the Palestinian Red Crescent said. Aid agency MSF said its workers were cornered in southern Gaza and hindered from providing desperately needed help.
In Jabalia in northern Gaza, which has been heavily bombed, people picked their way through ruined streets filled with sewage and garbage, video showed. Hunger and deadly diseases are spreading.
In Khan Younis, Hamas' military wing said it had killed some Israeli troops.
The Palestinian health ministry said a 17-year-old was killed and four other Palestinians wounded by Israeli army gunfire in the West Bank town of Beit Rima. Some 300 Palestinians have died there since the war erupted, the UN says.
Blinken is due to visit the West Bank during a week-long tour starting Friday in Turkiye, which has offered to mediate. He will also visit Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and make a stop in Greece.
"It is in no one's interest, not Israel's, not the region's, not the world's, for this conflict to spread beyond Gaza," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. "We don't expect every conversation on this trip to be easy."
Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, was due in Lebanon Friday to discuss the situation at the Israeli border.
The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, said Friday the militia had conducted around 670 military operations on the border with Israel since Oct 8, destroying many Israeli military vehicles.
A 25th Israeli hostage had been declared dead, a government spokesperson said Friday.
"Netanyahu does not care if all the hostages are killed, his own brother Yonatan was killed in a failed operation to release hostages," Hamas' military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement, referring to the Israeli prime minister's commando brother's death in the raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.
The World Health Organisation said hospitals and other medical infrastructure in Gaza have been attacked nearly 600 times since the conflict erupted. Some 613 people have died within facilities and more than 770 wounded, it said.