At least eight Palestinians, most of them children, were killed and more than a dozen were wounded in central Gaza when they went to collect water on Sunday, local officials said, in an Israeli strike which the military said missed its target, Reuters reported.

The Israeli military said the missile had intended to hit an Islamic Jihad militant in the area but that a malfunction had caused it to fall “dozens of metres from the target”.

“The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians,” it said in a statement, adding that the incident was under review.

The strike hit a water distribution point in Nuseirat refugee camp, killing six children and injuring 17 others, said Ahmed Abu Saifan, an emergency physician at Al-Awda Hospital.

Water shortages in Gaza have worsened sharply in recent weeks, with fuel shortages causing desalination and sanitation facilities to close, making people dependent on collection centres where they can fill up their plastic containers.

Hours later, 12 people were killed by an Israeli strike on a market in Gaza City, including a prominent hospital consultant, Ahmad Qandil, Palestinian media reported. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the attack.

Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that more than 58,000 people had been killed since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, with 139 people added to the death toll over the past 24 hours, read the report.

The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its tally, but says over half of those killed are women and children.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said on Sunday that he was “hopeful” on Gaza ceasefire negotiations underway in Qatar.

He told reporters in Teterboro, New Jersey, that he planned to meet senior Qatari officials on the sidelines of the FIFA Club World Cup final.

However, negotiations aimed at securing a ceasefire have been stalling, with the two sides divided over the extent of an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian enclave, Palestinian and Israeli sources said at the weekend.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to convene ministers late on Sunday to discuss the latest developments in the talks, an Israeli official said.

The indirect talks over a U.S. proposal for a 60-day ceasefire are being held in Doha, but optimism that surfaced last week of a looming deal has largely faded, with both sides accusing each other of intransigence, Reuters reported.

Netanyahu in a video he posted on Telegram on Sunday said Israel would not back down from its core demands – releasing all the hostages still in Gaza, destroying Hamas and ensuring Gaza will never again be a threat to Israel.

The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages into Gaza. At least 20 of the remaining 50 hostages there are believed to still be alive.

Families of hostages gathered outside Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem to call for a deal.

“The overwhelming majority of the people of Israel have spoken loudly and clearly. We want to do a deal, even at the cost of ending this war, and we want to do it now,” said Jon Polin, whose son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held hostage by Hamas in a Gaza tunnel and slain by his captors in August 2024.

Netanyahu and his ministers were also set to discuss a plan on Sunday to move hundreds of thousands of Gazans to the southern area of Rafah, in what Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has described as a new “humanitarian city” but which would be likely to draw international criticism for forced displacement.

An Israeli source briefed on discussions in Israel said that the plan was to establish the complex in Rafah during the ceasefire, if it is reached.

On Saturday, a Palestinian source familiar with the truce talks said that Hamas rejected withdrawal maps which Israel proposed, because they would leave around 40% of the territory under Israeli control, including all of Rafah.

Israel’s campaign against Hamas has displaced almost the entire population of more than 2 million people, but Gazans say nowhere is safe in the coastal enclave, read the report.

Early on Sunday morning, a missile hit a house in Gaza City where a family had moved after receiving an evacuation order from their home in the southern outskirts.

“My aunt, her husband and the children, are gone. What is the fault of the children who died in an ugly bloody massacre at dawn?” said Anas Matar, standing in the rubble of the building.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Russia’s top diplomat his country was ready to “unconditionally support” all actions taken by Moscow to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, state media reported on Sunday, as the two countries held high-level strategic talks, Reuters reported.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is on a three-day visit to North Korea, which has provided troops and arms for Russia’s war with Ukraine and pledged more military support as Moscow tries to make advances in the conflict.

Kim met Lavrov in the eastern coastal city of Wonsan where the two countries’ foreign ministers held their second strategic dialogue, pledging further cooperation under a partnership treaty signed last year that includes a mutual defense pact.

Kim told Lavrov the steps taken by the allies in response to radically evolving global geopolitics will contribute greatly to securing peace and security around the world, North Korea’s state news agency KCNA reported.

“Kim Jong Un reaffirmed the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is ready to unconditionally support and encourage all the measures taken by the Russian leadership as regards the tackling of the root cause of the Ukrainian crisis,” KCNA said.

Lavrov earlier held talks with his North Korean counterpart Choe Son Hui in Wonsan, and they issued a joint statement pledging support to safeguard the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of each other’s country, KCNA said.

On Saturday, Russian media reported Lavrov described the two countries’ ties as “an invincible fighting brotherhood” in his meeting with Kim and thanked him for the troops deployed to Russia, read the report.

Relations between Russia and North Korea have deepened dramatically during the last two years of the war in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, with Pyongyang deploying more than 10,000 troops and arms to Russia to back Moscow’s military campaign.

Kim’s government has pledged to send about 6,000 military engineers and builders to help reconstruction work in Russia’s Kursk region.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday refused to allow Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and two of his co-defendants to plead guilty under agreements that would have spared them the death penalty.

The ruling by a 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upended an attempt to bring an end to a military prosecution of the three detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that has been beset by two decades of legal gridlock.

Those plea agreements had been offered last year and accepted by the official who oversees the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war court, only to be revoked in August by then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin after Republican lawmakers attacked the agreements.

A military judge, though, ruled that Austin lacked authority to revoke the plea deals in a decision that was upheld in December by U.S. Court of Military Commission Review. The judge then scheduled prompt plea hearings.

The D.C. Circuit at the behest of former Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration agreed to pause those proceedings while it heard the government’s legal challenge, which Republican President Donald Trump’s administration continued.

U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Neomi Rao, writing for the majority, in Friday’s ruling said Austin “indisputably had legal authority to withdraw from the agreements.”

“Having properly assumed the convening authority, the Secretary determined that the ‘families and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out,” the judges wrote. “The secretary acted within the bounds of his legal authority, and we decline to second-guess his judgment.”

Millett was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, while Rao is a Trump appointee. U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, dissented from what he called a “stunning” ruling, saying his colleagues should have deferred to the decisions of military courts interpreting military rules.

A lawyer for Mohammed and one of his co-defendants, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the Pentagon.

Matthew Engle, an attorney for the third defendant, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin ‘Atash, said he was considering a potential further appeal, including to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mohammed is the most well-known inmate at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, which was set up in 2002 by then-U.S. President George W. Bush to house foreign militant suspects following the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people.