A ceasefire is expected on Saturday night after five days of rocket fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip, which has killed 35 people since Tuesday, AFP reported. Agerpres.

Egypt, the traditional mediator between the warring parties, reached an agreement between the two sides on a truce starting at 19:00 GMT, an Egyptian security official and a Palestinian source close to the talks told AFP late on Saturday.

In an interview with AFP, an Israeli government official declined to comment after a day of fresh violence.

Several more rockets were fired at around 21:15 local time (18:15 GMT) from the Gaza Strip, AFP journalists reported.

Shortly before the cease-fire was announced, Israeli General Herzi Halevi, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hailed the fact that Israel had “achieved important objectives during this campaign.”

Earlier, the “Al-Quds Brigades”, the military wing of the “Islamic Jihad”, announced the continuation of “rocket shelling of Israeli cities” in the face of ongoing Israeli killings and bombings.

The escalation of the situation, the most violent between the Gaza Strip and Israel since August 2022, began on Tuesday with airstrikes that allowed Israel to eliminate three military commanders of Islamic Jihad, a movement classified as terrorist by the United States and Europe. Union.

In Gaza, a territory under Israeli blockade since the Islamist movement Hamas seized power in 2007, the Interior Ministry accused Israel of focusing its strikes on “civilian targets and residential buildings” and called on local and international human rights organizations to “press (on Israel) to put an end to crimes (related to) international justice.”

On Saturday evening, more than 2,000 Israeli demonstrators marched in Tel Aviv. Many of them waved Palestinian flags or placards reading “Stop the War”.

According to the Israeli army, a Palestinian rocket fell during the day on an Israeli agricultural area in Shokedah, less than ten kilometers from the Gaza Strip, injuring a Palestinian worker who was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

The death brings to 34 the number of Palestinians killed since Tuesday. On the Israeli side, an eighty-year-old man was killed on Thursday in Rehovot, in central Israel.

In a statement, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayeh “asked for the intervention of the United Nations to put an end to Israeli crimes.”

Among the killed Palestinians are six Islamic Jihad military commanders, fighters of this movement and other members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) confirmed the death of at least 13 Palestinian civilians, including seven minors. The Israeli army says that four civilians, including three minors, were killed by Palestinian rockets that fell in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military also says it has hit 371 “terrorist targets” since Tuesday and that more than 1,230 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel, more than 370 of which were intercepted by the air defense system, which normally only fires when rockets threaten civilians points

AFP reporters saw two buses loaded with foreign nationals hired by international organizations being evacuated from Gaza on Saturday afternoon.

Violence also took place in the northern West Bank, where two Palestinian fighters were killed in an Israeli army raid on Saturday morning. A third Palestinian was killed in the afternoon, according to the army, after he tried to attack police with a knife.