CAIRO/GAZA (Dispatches) -- Israeli strikes killed at least 24 people including young quintuplets in Gaza on Sunday, Palestinian health authorities said, ahead of a visit to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. 
The children and their mother were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the central town of Deir Al-Balah, health officials said.  
Making his 10th trip to the region since the war began last October, Blinken was due in Occupied Palestine on Sunday, days after the U.S. put forward a new proposal for ceasefire. 
At Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, relatives gathered around the bodies of the mother and her six children, who were wrapped in white shrouds bearing their names. The youngest was aged 18 months, their grandfather Muhammad Khattab told Reuters at the funeral.
“The six children have become body parts. They were placed in a single bag,” he told reporters. “What was their crime? ... Did they kill a Jew? Did they shoot at the Jews? Did they launch rockets at the Jews? Did they destroy Israel? What did they do? What did they do to deserve this?” said Khattab.
After 10 months of war, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are living in constant desperation to find a safe place.
“We are tired of displacement. People are being pushed into narrow areas in Deir al-Balah and al-Mawasi, which have become pressure cookers,” Tamer al-Burai, who lives in Deir al-Balah with several relatives, told Reuters via a chat app. Tanks were just 1.5 km (0.9 miles) away, Burai added.
Another strike east of Deir al-Balah killed at least four people. A strike in the northern town of Jabaliya hit two apartments, killing two men, a woman and her daughter, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Another two strikes in central Gaza killed nine people, according to Al-Awda
 Hospital. Late Saturday, a strike near the southern city of Khan Younis killed four people from the same family, including two women, according to Nasser Hospital.
On Friday, the military ordered the evacuation of areas north of Khan Younis and east of Deir al-Balah where hundreds of thousands of people displaced by earlier fighting had been sheltering in dire conditions.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Friday’s orders, which included other parts of Gaza outside the humanitarian zones, had reduced the size of the “humanitarian area” designated as safe by Israeli forces to about 11% of the total area of the territory.
The Deir al-Balah municipality, estimating the current population in the city at 1 million, said the evacuation orders meant more people were crammed into a smaller space.
Additionally, water shortages loomed as several water wells and tankers that used to provide residents with 60% of supplies were located in the areas under evacuation orders, the municipality said in a statement on Sunday.
Blinken was due to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.
Netanyahu’s office described the talks as “complex” and said it was “conducting negotiations, not giving way in negotiations”.  
Hamas said that optimistic U.S. comments were “deceptive” and accused Netanyahu of making new conditions in an attempt to “blow up” the negotiation.
While details of the negotiations have not been made public, there have been differences over several key issues. Disagreements include over whether Zionist troops should remain present in Gaza after the fighting ends, notably along the so-called Philadelphi corridor on the border with Egypt, and over checks on people going into northern Gaza from the south.
Hamas has pushed for a ceasefire deal to end the war, while Israel has not been willing to agree to go beyond a temporary pause in the fighting.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza has martyred killed about 41,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to Palestinian health authorities, and reduced much of Gaza to rubble.