Gaza live: Several dead including Hezbollah commander after Israeli strike on southern Beirut

The United States will continue to engage with mediators Egypt and Qatar in the coming days “to push for a final agreement” for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday.

Progress was made on the remaining obstacles during talks last week, Miller told reporters, but said reaching a deal will require flexibility on both sides.

Israeli forces killed at least 35 Palestinians across Gaza on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, amid brief pauses in fighting to conduct a third day of polio vaccinations for children.

Among those killed were four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in Gaza City in the north, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said.

Later on Tuesday, an Israeli air strike killed nine Palestinians inside a house near Omar al-Mokhtar Street in Gaza City, according to medics, and others were killed in separate air strikes across the territory.

The targeting of residential homes and shelters in Gaza City has increased since this morning, the spokesperson of Gaza’s civil defense said in a post on Telegram.

Israeli artillery and drones also targeted southern Gaza in a location which is difficult to reach for civil defense teams, he added.

Israeli forces on Tuesday killed three people, including Lujain Osama Musleh, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.

Musleh was killed in the town of Kafr Dan, just outside of Jenin. The Israeli incursion on the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank is now in its seventh day.

At least 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israel across the occupied West Bank since Wednesday, the Palestinian ministry of health has reported.

The death toll includes six children and and two elderly people, with Jenin seeing 18 killed alone.

The ministry said the total killed in the territory since October stands at 682 with the number of injuries at 5,700.

A polio eradication scheme in Gaza is "going quite well", a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official told Al-Jazeera.

Hamid Jafari, director of polio eradication for the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region, told the outlet they had "already vaccinated more children than we had estimated were in this middle zone of Gaza."

"This is the first phase of the campaign. By this evening, we will make an assessment whether there are still children that need to be vaccinated… because we are now finding more children in this area than we had estimated," he said.

“So we will likely need tomorrow as well to continue vaccination."

Jordan has welcomed the UK's decision to suspend 30 arms licenses to Israel, but said more needed to be done.

“We urge an expansion of this suspension and call on all countries to impose a complete arms embargo on Israel," Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi wrote on social media.

“Unless consequences are real, Netanyahu will not end his aggression on Gaza and the West Bank, and will not stop violating international law and threatening the security of the whole region.”

A Turkish foreign ministry spokesperson said the United States has been misleading the public by claiming that Gaza ceasefire negotiations have been progressing positively, citing Hamas officials.

The spokesperson noted that although the US has a genuine interest in reaching a deal to end Israel's war on Gaza due to the upcoming elections, Washington isn't exerting any real pressure on Israel.

“The US has told [Hamas] that they would continue the current talks for two more weeks and then end them if there is no resolution,” the spokesperson said, citing a Hamas official personally involved in the negotiations.

“This stance is extremely dangerous because it means we will be back at square one.”

READ MORE: US sets two-week deadline for Gaza ceasefire talks, Turkish official says

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will head to Israel later this week, Israel's foreign ministry told the Times of Israel.

Baerbock will meet Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz in Tel Aviv on Friday, and is also expected to meet with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Gaza's health ministry said that 33 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks in the past 24 hours and 67 were injured.

In total, 40,819 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and 94,291 injured since the start of the war on 7 October.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drawn fire for rejecting calls to soften his demand that Israel retain control of a key buffer zone with Egypt in a press briefing on Monday.

During the briefing, Netanyahu insisted on the "strategic imperative" that Israeli troops remain in the Philadelphi corridor, a buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza that has emerged as a major stumbling block in truce talks.

An unnamed source close to ceasefire negotiations told CNN that Netanyahu has "torpedoed everything in one speech".

Hamas has ruled out any Israeli presence, while Netanyahu has insisted that under a truce agreement, there would be no Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors.

READ MORE: Netanyahu reiterates demand for Israeli control of Philadelphi corridor

Germany's Lufthansa announced it will resume flights to Tel Aviv, Israel on Thursday, following weeks of flight suspensions due to the tense situation in the Middle East.

The company's flights to Beirut, Lebanon will remain suspended until 30 September.

A senior Israeli air force told Haaretz that US supplies of weapons, especially to the air force, are the main reason Israel has been able to keep the war on Gaza going.

Without American support, the official says Israel would have struggled to sustain its war for more than a few months.

The air force is now crafting a recommendation to increase the local production of bombs, missiles and other ammunition to reduce dependence on other countries, particularly the US.

Israel’s war on Gaza has seen the emergence of polio among Palestinians during the past few weeks.

On Sunday, a UN-led campaign began to vaccinate at least 90 percent of the territory’s children and stop the outbreak from spreading. More than 200 teams are now inoculating an estimated 600,000 children in 25 central Gaza locations in the coming days.

To do so, they have had to secure brief and localised halts in fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas while the programme is rolled out.

READ MORE: Why is there a polio outbreak in Gaza?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office slammed the UK's decision to suspend 30 out of 350 arms licences to Israel.

"This shameful decision will not change Israel's determination to defeat Hamas," the office said on X.

The office added that the UK's "misguided decision will only embolden Hamas".

The UK's decision followed a review under the new Labour government which found that British-made weapons may have been used in violation of international humanitarian law in Gaza.

Hamas is still holding more than 100 hostages, including five British citizens.

Instead of standing with Israel, a fellow democracy defending itself against barbarism, Britain’s misguided decision will only embolden Hamas.

— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) September 3, 2024