GAZA CITY (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime’s military strikes have martyred at least 14 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the enclave’s Health Ministry said on Sunday, as Arab and U.S. mediators work to shore up a fragile ceasefire between the occupying regime and Hamas.
Palestinian officials say dozens of people have been killed by Israeli fire despite the January 19 truce that halted large-scale fighting in Gaza.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said most of the latest deaths took place on Saturday when an Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians including four journalists in the town of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military said six men that it had identified as members of the armed wings of Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad resistance group had been killed in the strike. 
Salama Marouf, the head of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, said the military’s statement about the incident included the names of people who were not present.
It was based on inaccurate social media reports “without even bothering to verify the facts”, Marouf said.
At least four more Palestinians were killed in separate Israeli strikes on Saturday, the Gaza health officials said.
An Israeli drone had fired a missile at a group of Palestinians in the town of Juhr Eldeek in central Gaza on Sunday, killing a 62-year-old man and wounding several others, the medics said. Several others were hurt when an Israeli drone fired a missile towards a group of people in Rafah, they added.
The Israeli military said it was not familiar with the reported drone strikes.
Persistent bloodshed in Gaza underscores the fragility of the three-stage ceasefire agreement mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States, which have stepped in to hammer out a deal between the regime and Hamas over how to proceed.
The Zionist regime wants to extend the ceasefire’s first phase, a proposal backed by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff. Hamas says it will resume freeing captives only under the second phase that was due to begin on March 2.
Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Saturday negotiators had been instructed to be ready to continue talks based on the mediators’ response to a U.S. proposal for the release of 11 living captives and half of the dead captives.