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GAZA CITY, PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES — When an Israeli air strike targeted a security office near her home in Gaza this month, 10-year-old Zeina Dabous frantically scribbled a note and slipped it under her mother's pillow.

"Mummy, my love, I am very very scared. If we all die, put us in the same grave all together so I can stay in your arms," she wrote.

"I want to wear my eid clothes," she added, of the outfit she never got to wear for the Muslim celebration after Israeli air strikes on the Palestinian enclave started on May 10.

The 11-day bombing campaign came in response to rocket fire from Gaza by Hamas and other militants, triggered by an Israeli forces crackdown on worshippers at East Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque compound.

Though a ceasefire has since Friday halted the air raids, experts warn that children in the besieged coastal strip will likely carry the mental scars for years to come.

Psychologists say many are showing signs of depression, anxiety, behavioural disorders or irritability and many are wetting their bed.

At home in Gaza city just before the bombing stopped, Zeina said she was constantly petrified and barely sleeping.

"They're always bombing," she told AFP.

After a strike hit very close, "before sleeping I wrote a note in red pen to my mother and slipped it under the pillow because I was scared I would die", she said.

Zeina is one of around a million children living in Gaza, according to the UN's children agency UNICEF.

Israeli strikes on Gaza killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, and have wounded another 1,900 people, the Gaza health ministry says.

Rockets and other fire from Gaza have claimed 12 lives in Israel, including one child and an Arab-Israeli teenager, an Israeli soldier, one Indian, and two Thai nationals, medics say. Some 357 people in Israel have been wounded.

There is controversy about how many of those killed in Gaza were combatants, and how many were civilians.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's bombing campaign had killed "more than 200 terrorists" in Gaza.

'Don't be scared' 

Israeli air strikes also pounded the densely populated enclave in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014.

When the last war raged, Zeina was no older than four.

“A whole generation of children has been ravaged by repeated conflicts,” said Zeina’s grandfather, Saeed Dabous.

The charity Save the Children on Friday warned that children in Gaza would suffer for years to come.

They “are suffering from fear and anxiety, a lack of sleep, and are displaying worrying signs of distress, such as constant shaking and bedwetting”, it said.

In their grandfather’s home, Maysa Abu al-Awf, 22, held her two-year-old brother Ahmad on her lap and tried to comfort him after they lost two sisters and dozens of relatives in a devastating air strike.

“I’m scared, I’m scared,” Ahmad constantly repeated, a scab on his hand and stitches on his bare foot.

Maysa said that whenever he heard an explosion, he cried out. “I tell him, ‘don’t be scared, it’s just the sound of balloons popping’.”

After air strikes demolished their four-storey family home in Gaza city on Sunday last week, Maysa, little Ahmad and their sister Maram, who is seven, screamed for hours under the rubble before they were rescued.

Their two sisters, 20-year-old dentistry student Shaima and 17-year-old school pupil Rawan, did not survive.

Sitting beside her grandfather, Maram shook as she recounted being trapped under the rubble.

“I called out for Mummy... I called for them to get me out,” she said.

At the site of her demolished home, AFP saw Maram’s favourite red teddy bear lying in the debris, foam spilling from its left leg.

“I am sad,” Maram said. “All my books and notebooks were burnt.”

‘Catastrophic number’ 

In the Gaza Strip’s main Shifa hospital, their 16-year-old cousin Omar was in shock after the same strike killed his two brothers and father, who was the head of internal medicine at the facility.

He had stopped talking, his family said.

During Israel’s latest military campaign on the coastal strip, which is home to two million people, the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) posted advice for parents on Facebook.

It told them to discuss feelings with their children, but also to try to distract them from the sounds of war with games, drawing or prayers.

There is no overall tally of how many children are suffering from mental health issues in Gaza due to repeated conflict, the GCMHP says.

But it said it records hundreds of new cases a month.

Psychologist Mohammed Abu Sabeh said children exposed to “great trauma” often then exhibit “violent behavioural disorders”.

“The wars are sowing violence in schools and homes,” he said.

Most children in the Gaza Strip suffer from “depression, anxiety or a behavioural disorder”, and “a catastrophic number” of them need treatment.

“I’m not optimistic,” Abu Sabeh said.

“This war will create an aggressive, violent and hateful generation.”

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — For decades, it was the place to go for books in the blockaded Gaza Strip, from school texts to the Koran to Arabic translations of European literary classics.

But last Tuesday, owner Samir Al Mansour watched in disbelief as the bookshop and publishing house he had poured his life into went up in smoke.

"Forty years of my life were obliterated in less than a second," said the man in his 50s, a cigarette between his fingers, staring at a mound of concrete, paper and squashed plastic chairs.

"There are 100,000 books under this rubble," he said.

At around 5:00am on Tuesday, Mansour was at home watching television when the channel reported the Israeli air force was about to hit the building housing his bookshop.

Mansour rushed over, but came to a dead stop some 200 metres away from the building, just in time to see a missile obliterate his life's work.

The latest deadly clashes lasted 11 days and saw Israel launch air strikes in response to a rocket barrage by Hamas, which rules Gaza, and other Islamist groups.

"I have nothing to do with an armed group, a political faction," Mansour told AFP.

"It's an attack on culture."

'Never happened before' 

Mansour started working in his father's bookshop in the 1980s, when he was just 14 years old, then took over in 2000 and soon branched out into publishing.

As rescue workers continue to look for bodies and survivors in the rubble after the military conflict, Mansour was mourning all that he has lost.

Buried in the rubble were copies of Islamic religious texts, children's picture books and a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov".

Israeli strikes on Gaza since May 10 have killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, and have wounded over 1,900 people, the Gaza health ministry says.

Rockets and other fire from Gaza have claimed 12 lives in Israel, including one child and an Arab-Israeli teenager, an Israeli soldier, one Indian, and two Thai nationals, medics say. Some 357 people in Israel have been wounded.

There is controversy about how many of those killed in Gaza were combatants, and how many were civilians.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's bombing campaign had killed "more than 200 terrorists" in Gaza.

Mansour said he had lived through two Palestinian uprisings and three Gaza wars.

"But this had never happened, my bookshop was never destroyed," he said.

His son-in-law Montasser Saleh had arrived in Gaza from Norway to visit the family just before the conflict started, and was with him when his life was turned upside down.

"We were at home, watching television," Saleh said.

'More than a bookshop' 

He recounted how on the TV channel Al Jazeera "they said there had been a warning shot on the building containing the bookshop".

He too said they immediately rushed over to the building.

"Samir wanted to go and grab some papers, his computer, but he was too scared to go in and be hit by a missile, so we stayed outside," he said.

Mosaab Abu Toha, a poet and the founder of the Edward Said library started after the Gaza war in 2014, said the Gaza Strip had lost "one of its main cultural resources".

"Mansour was more than a bookshop," he said. "It was a publishing house publishing Gaza writers.

"The books were printed in Egypt — some to come back to Gaza, but others to stay there and be circulated around the Arab world.

"It was a way to lift the siege on Gaza through literature," he said of the blockade on the Palestinian territory in place since 2007.

For Gaza readers, the publishing house had printed around 1,000 copies of the works of local authors such as Ghareeb Askalani or Yusri Al Ghoul.

Mansour is not the only book or stationery shop destroyed in the latest Israeli bombing campaign.

Nearby Iqraa was also levelled, and the Al Nahda stationery and bookshop was reduced to a pile of pulverised cinderblocks.

In front of what remains of Al Nahda, a poster assured loyal customers it would reopen soon.

"Ideas do not die," it read.

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — Cafés reopened, fishermen set out to sea and shopkeepers dusted off shelves on Saturday as Gazans slowly resumed their daily lives after a deadly 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel.

Aid trickled into the Gaza Strip, the blockaded enclave controlled by the Islamist group Hamas, as the focus turned to rebuilding the devastated territory a day after a ceasefire took hold.

The Egypt-brokered truce halted Israeli air strikes on the crowded Palestinian territory and rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups at Israel since May 10.

Rescue workers searched for bodies or survivors in mounds of rubble after what Gazans referred to in the street as the latest "war" or "escalation" with Israel.

In Gaza City's port, Rami Abu Amira and a dozen other fisherman prepared their nets before heading out to sea for the first time in two weeks.

"We need to eat", he said after the Gaza coastguard allowed fishing again, though adding he would stick close to the coastline to stay safe.

"We, fishermen, are scared the Israeli navy will shoot at us. It's up to everyone to decide whether to go or not".

‘All lost’

The latest round of bombardment killed 248 people in Gaza, including 66 children and wounded more than 1,900 since May 10, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

The United Nations says more than half of those killed, the overwhelming majority in Israeli air strikes, were civilians.

During the same period, rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups killed 12 people in Israel including one child, a teenager, an Israeli soldier, one Indian and two Thai nationals, the police say. Some 357 people in Israel were injured.

On Friday evening in Gaza, Palestinian families had rushed to seaside cafes to breathe fresh air or smoke shisha.

In a clothes store near the ruins of a ravaged tower block in the upscale neighbourhood of Rimal in Gaza City, mannequins still wore the latest 2021 trends, but they were now caked in dust.

Bilal Mansur, 29, said all his merchandise had been ruined.

“There’s dust everywhere, dust from the Israeli bombs clinging to the clothes. We won’t be able to sell them,” he said.

Nearby store-owner Wael Amin Al Sharafa said he had stocked up his shop with new clothes to sell during the usually busy season of Eid Al Fitr at the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

“But now it’s all lost,” he said. “Who will pay for all this? I have no idea.”

‘Two-state solution’

Convoys of lorries carrying aid began passing into Gaza on Friday through the Kerem Shalom crossing after it was reopened by Israel, bringing much-needed medicine, food and fuel.

The UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund said it had released $18.5 million for humanitarian efforts.

The latest round of Israeli bombardment forced 91,000 people to flee their homes in Gaza, the UN humanitarian agency says.

It has hit 1,447 homes, completely destroying 205 residential blocks or homes, as well as ravaged electricity and water supply, according to the Gaza authorities.

The UN says three main desalination plants providing drinking water for more than 400,000 people have stopped working.

Both sides were fast to claim victory, as Egyptian state media said two Egyptian security delegations had arrived to monitor the deal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s bombing campaign had been an “exceptional success”.

Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh said they had “dealt a painful and severe blow that will leave its deep marks” on Israel, and thanked Iran for “providing funds and weapons”.

The international community welcomed the ceasefire.

US President Joe Biden pledged to help organise efforts to rebuild Gaza and said creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel is the “only answer” to the conflict.

“We still need a two-state solution,” he said.

Peace talks have stalled since 2014 including over the key issues of the status of occupied East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Al Aqsa clashes

In a reminder of ongoing tensions despite the ceasefire, Israeli police on Friday fired stun grenades at worshippers in the highly sensitive Al Aqsa Mosque Compound in Jerusalem.

Israeli forces beat an AFP photographer who was covering the unrest there.

The incident was reminiscent of the tensions in Jerusalem that sparked the latest round of conflict.

Israeli occupation forces had cracked down on protests against the expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

And they had also moved in on worshippers at Al Aqsa, Islam’s third holiest site.

Hamas on May 10 launched of rockets from Gaza towards Israel, in “solidarity” with Palestinians in Jerusalem.

The conflict sparked mob violence in Israel, and clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters in the West Bank.

Israeli forces have killed 25 Palestinians, including four under the age of 18, in the West Bank since May 10, the authorities in the territory say. Israel claims five tried to attack Israeli forces.

BEIT HANUN, Palestinian Territories — Walking down a sandy path in the northern Gaza Strip, father of six Ramez Al Masri points to a huge crater where his home used to be.

A ceasefire early Friday ended 11 days of relentless Israeli air strikes on the besieged coastal enclave run by Islamist group Hamas.

But the truce was too late to save the Masri family’s home.

“When I came home and I saw this massive hole instead of our building, I was in shock,” said the 39-year-old Palestinian.

“The war isn’t over, it’s still there in front of me and inside me.”

The house — or what remains of it — is in Beit Hanun, the village closest to the Erez Crossing between northern Gaza and Israel.

Last week, an Israeli officer called him late at night to tell him to flee his home with his wife and children.

They had just enough time to rush for shelter in a nearby clinic.

A few minutes later, an Israeli air strike pummelled down through their three-storey house, blasting a six-metre-deep crater in the ground, shattering the water and sewage networks and blowing out windows in nearby buildings.

In a young neighbour’s bedroom, glass shards, mangled metal and lumps of concrete lay on the ground near a large red heart and a message painted on the wall: “Happy birthday, my love.”

‘Stench of death’

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 248 people including 66 children in Gaza since May 10, the health ministry says. Israel says fighters too have been killed.

Twelve people were killed in Israel, including a child and a teenager, with one soldier struck by an anti-tank missile, Israeli authorities say.

The Israeli bombing campaign was the deadliest since a 2014 conflict in the Gaza Strip.

In that war too, Masri lost a home, which he said had taken him all of three years to rebuild.

“Will it now again take me another three years to rebuild?” he asked.

“Will it take until the summer of 2024?”

For the moment his family is staying with relatives and waiting for aid — local or international — so they can rent a new home while they wait.

The 2014 war had ravaged the enclave. The Israeli forces sent in ground troops who engaged in heavy clashes with Hamas, leaving buildings riddled with bullet holes.

This time the war just came from the air.

For the first time in days, tens of thousands of Gaza residents ventured out of their homes on Friday, checking on neighbours, examining ravaged buildings, visiting the sea — and burying their dead.

In the nearby village of Beit Lahia, a tall building had been flattened to a pile of smashed concrete layers.

“There were nine dead here. We searched for them for 18 hours after the Israeli strike, which crushed everything,” said 59-year-old Rabah Al Mahdoun.

A policeman nearby said everything had been permeated by the “stench of death”.

‘Nothing left’ 

Above the mountain of rubble, a foul smell grasped at the nose and throat.

Elsewhere in the strip that day, rescue workers pulled five bodies from what appeared to once have been a tunnel.

Umm Mohammed says she lost her family home and donkeys in the Israeli air strikes.

“Everything is destroyed, we have nothing left,” she said.

Her children were petrified through the latest round of bombardment, she said.

“My son Akram was just four days old when the 2014 war broke out, and I had told myself I wanted to make sure he never had to live through that again,” she said.

She wonders now if, after they rebuild their home, it will again be demolished in another round of violence.

“We need peace,” she said.

A neighbour, Thaer, interrupted.

“Real peace means an end to the Israeli blockade on Gaza” in place since 2007, he said.

It means “being able to approach the checkpoint with Israel without being shot at, and to cross over to work in Israel”.

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — Diplomatic efforts gathered pace Thursday for a ceasefire on the 11th day of deadly violence between Israel and armed Palestinian groups in Gaza, as air strikes again hammered the enclave.

The Israeli security cabinet was set to meet at 16:00 GMT to discuss a possible ceasefire with the Hamas Islamist movement ruling the besieged and crowded coastal strip, official sources told AFP.

In the southern Gaza town of Rafah, devastating Israeli air strikes turned buildings into clouds of dust and rubble, as an ambulance sped across town to help the wounded, an AFP reporter said.

Rocket fire from Gaza intensified in the afternoon, sending Israelis living on its borders running into shelters, according to Israeli forces warnings.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres told the General Assembly Thursday that "the fighting must stop immediately", calling the continued exchanges of fire between Israeli forces and Palestinian groups "unacceptable".

"If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza," Guterres added.

News of the Israeli security Cabinet meeting came after pressure mounted to end the bloodshed, following US President Joe Biden's call for a "significant de-escalation".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, set to attend the evening meeting with top security officials, earlier vowed to push on until the military campaign reaches its objective, "to restore quiet and security" for Israelis.

'Intense' negotiations 

UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland was visiting Qatar for talks with Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, as part of an effort to "restore calm," according to a diplomatic source.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "indirect talks" with Hamas were essential to advancing efforts toward an end of hostilities.

"Of course Hamas has to be included, because without Hamas there will be no ceasefire," Merkel said, who also spoke to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas Thursday, where they agreed the need "for a speedy ceasefire".

Her foreign minister, Heiko Maas, speaking earlier near Tel Aviv, expressed Germany's "solidarity" with Israel but also called for an end to the fighting.

"Israel has the right to defend itself against this massive and unacceptable attack," Maas said of the rockets Hamas first fired on May 10, following violent clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians in Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque compound.

"The number of victims is rising every day and this greatly concerns us".

A senior Hamas official told AFP: "We expect a return to calm in the coming hours, or tomorrow [Friday], but it depends on the cessation of the aggression of the occupation forces in Gaza and Jerusalem.

"But there is nothing definitive for the moment," added the source, indicating that Qatar, an emirate that hosts Haniyeh and sends financial aid to Gaza, was at the heart of "intense" negotiations.

The Israeli army said Hamas and other Islamist armed groups in Gaza have fired 4,070 rockets towards Israel, but the overwhelming majority of those headed for populated areas were intercepted by its Iron Dome air defences.

The rockets have claimed 12 lives in Israel, including two children and an Israeli soldier, with one Indian and two Thai nationals among those killed, the police say.

Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed 232 Palestinians, including 65 children, fighters and another 1,900 wounded, according to the Gaza health ministry, leaving vast areas in rubble and displacing some 120,000 people, according to Hamas authorities.

Overnight, Israel continued to pound Gaza with air strikes and artillery fire aimed at destroying Hamas tunnels and other infrastructure, the military said.

'Sitting in his wheelchair' 

One Israeli strike on Gaza on Wednesday killed a disabled man, his pregnant wife and their three-year-old child, the enclave's health ministry said.

"What did my brother do?" the man's bereaved brother Omar Saleha, 31, told AFP. "He was just sitting in his wheelchair".

Israel says it takes all steps to avoid civilian casualties, including by phoning residents to warn them of imminent strikes, and blames Hamas for placing weapons and military sites in densely populated areas.

The United States, a key Israel ally, has repeatedly blocked any joint UN Security Council statement calling for a halt to hostilities, including one proposed by France, saying it could undermine de-escalation efforts.

Israel's bombing campaign has left the two million people of Gaza, which has been under Israeli blockade for 14 years, desperate for relief.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that people in both Gaza and Israel "urgently need respite from non-stop hostilities."

The military conflict has sharply heightened tensions and sparked violence between Jews and Arab-Israelis, while Palestinian protesters in the West Bank and east Jerusalem have repeatedly clashed with security forces.

In the West Bank, the army has killed 25 Palestinians since the outbreak of hostilities. The worst death toll in years in the occupied Palestinian territory includes several Palestinians who the Israeli forces said had attempted to ram or stab Israeli forces at checkpoints.