News desk :The death toll in Gaza has passed 1,000, Palestinian medical officials say, 19 days after Israel launched an offensive against Hamas militants.It comes amid a 12-hour humanitarian truce, which Gaza residents have been using to gather essential supplies and retrieve bodies buried under rubble.Palestinians in the Gaza Strip poured into the streets on Saturday to recover their dead and stock up on food supplies after a 12-hour humanitarian truce agreed by Israel and Hamas took hold on the 19th day of their conflict.Women in the northern town of Beit Hanoun wailed as medics pulled three dead relatives from a home struck overnight by an Israeli air strike, with hospital officials saying 85 bodies had been found after the guns fell silent at 8 a.m. (1.00 a.m. EDT).Just before the truce started, 18 members of a single family, including five children, died in a strike near the southern town of Khan Younis, the Gaza Health Ministry said.US Secretary of State John Kerry has been spearheading international efforts to end the fighting, in which over 1000 Palestinians, many of them civilians, have been killed. His diplomatic push was to continue on Saturday in Paris.French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that the foreign ministers of all seven countries involved in the diplomacy – the United States, France, Britain, Italy, Germany, Turkey and Qatar – had called for an extension of the truce.”All of us call on the parties to extend the humanitarian ceasefire that is currently under way,” Fabius said. Israel said two more of its soldiers were killed in pre-truce fighting in Gaza, bringing the army death toll to 37 as troops battled militants in the tiny Mediterranean enclave that is home to 1.8 million Palestinians. Stunned residents of Beit Hanoun wandered through destroyed streets lined with damaged houses or mounds of rubble where once whole buildings had stood. Some who had not seen each other for days embraced as they surveyed the wreckage around them. Many of Beit Hanoun’s 30,000 residents had fled the area. “We hope the calm lasts and they find a solution so fighting ends. We are afraid for our children’s safety,” she said, adding she will not leave her home. “There is no place to go.”Fighting continued until the truce took hold. Militants fired a barrage of rockets out of Gaza, triggering sirens across much of southern and central Israel. No injuries were reported and the Iron Dome interceptor system shot down some missiles.Minutes after the truce began, many Gaza residents rushed out of their homes and lined up outside banks to withdraw cash. Gaza City market was packed with people buying food and clothes for the coming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.Another reports add: The bodies of at least 85 Palestinians were recovered from the rubble across the Gaza Strip in the first half of a 12-hour humanitarian truce on Saturday, medics said.Emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said the 85 bodies had been brought to hospitals in north, central and southern Gaza, as well as Gaza City, but that the toll was expected to rise further still.The grim discoveries raised the toll in Gaza on the 19th day of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group to 985, Qudra said. In northern Gaza, particularly the area of Beit Hanun, medics recovered 32 bodies, Qudra said, along with another 13 people discovered in the central areas of Bureij, Deir al-Balah and Nusseirat. Gaza City’s Shifa hospital received 29 bodies from the eastern neighbourhoods of Shejaiya, Zaitun and Tuffah, and 11 other bodies were taken to hospitals from the southern areas of Khan Yunis and Rafah, Qudra added.On Friday, Israeli fire on Gaza killed a pregnant woman and a senior Islamic Jihad figure, as the Palestinian death toll from 18 days of violence reached 848, emergency services said. Surgeons saved the life of the 23-year-old woman’s unborn child after the air strike hit a house in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, Qudra said.
