The United States, joined by Arab mediators, sought to conclude an agreement between Israel and Hamas to halt the 14-month-old war in the Gaza Strip, where medics said Israeli strikes killed at least 20 Palestinians on Wednesday.

A Palestinian official close to the negotiations said on Wednesday that mediators had narrowed gaps on most of the agreement's clauses. He said Israel had introduced conditions which Hamas rejected but would not elaborate.

On Tuesday, sources close to the talks in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, said an agreement could be signed in coming days on a ceasefire and a release of hostages held in Gaza in return for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 people in a house in the northern town of Beit Lahiya while six were killed in separate airstrikes in Gaza City, Nuseirat camp in central areas, and Rafah near the border with Egypt.

In Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, medics said four people were killed in an airstrike on a house. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military spokesman.

Later on Wednesday, medics told Reuters that an Israeli strike on a house in Jabalia killed at least 10 people.

Israeli forces have operated in the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya as well as the nearby Jabalia camp since October, in a campaign the military said aimed to prevent Hamas militants from regrouping.

Palestinians accuse Israel of carrying out acts of "ethnic cleansing" to depopulate the northern edge of the enclave to create a buffer zone. Israel denies it.

Hamas does not disclose its casualties, and the Palestinian health ministry does not distinguish in its daily death toll between combatants and non-combatants.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it struck a number of Hamas militants planning an imminent attack against Israeli forces operating in Jabalia.

Later on Wednesday, Muhammad Saleh, director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, said Israeli shelling in the vicinity damaged the facility, wounding seven medics and one patient inside the hospital.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

In the Central Gaza camp of Bureij, Palestinian families began leaving some districts after the army posted new evacuation orders on X and in written and audio messages to mobile phones of some of the population there, citing new firing of rockets by Palestinian militants from the area.

CEASEFIRE GAINS MOMENTUM

The U.S. administration, joined by mediators from Egypt and Qatar, has made intensive efforts in recent days to advance the talks before President Joe Biden leaves office next month.

In Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog met Adam Boehler, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s designated envoy for hostage affairs. Trump has threatened that "all hell is going to break out" if Hamas does not release its hostages by Jan. 20, the day Trump returns to the White House.

CIA Director William Burns was due in Doha on Wednesday for talks with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on bridging remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas, other knowledgeable sources said. The CIA declined to comment.

Israeli negotiators were in Doha on Monday looking to bridge gaps between Israel and Hamas on a deal Biden outlined in May.

There have been repeated rounds of talks over the past year, all of which have failed, with Israel insisting on retaining a military presence in Gaza and Hamas refusing to release hostages until the troops pulled out.

The war in Gaza, triggered by a Hamas-led attack on communities in southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and saw more than 250 abducted as hostages, has sent shockwaves across the Middle East and left Israel isolated internationally.

Israel's campaign has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, displaced most of the 2.3 million population and reduced much of the coastal enclave to ruins.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian will take part in a summit of big Muslim countries in Egypt on Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said, the first visit by an Iranian president to Egypt in more than a decade, Reuters reported.

Egypt is hosting the summit of the D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation, which also includes Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey.

Relations between Egypt and Iran have generally been fraught in recent decades but the two countries have stepped up high-level diplomatic contacts since the eruption of the Gaza crisis last year as Egypt tried to play a mediating role, read the report.

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi travelled to Egypt in October to discuss regional issues with Egyptian officials, while his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty travelled to Tehran earlier in July to attend Pezeshkian's inauguration.

"We have the important summit... known as D-8 in Egypt, the foreign minister will take part in the ministerial conference and then the summit will be held with the participation of the president," Baghaei said in a weekly televised news conference.

Iran will discuss regional and bilateral affairs with the participating countries on the sidelines of the summit, Baghaei added.

The D-8 was established in 1997 to improve cooperation between countries stretching from Southeast Asia to Africa.

A bomb hidden in an electric scooter killed a senior Russian general in charge of nuclear protection forces in Moscow on Tuesday, Russia’s investigative committee said.

Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who is chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, was killed outside an apartment building on Ryazansky Prospekt, which starts a road some seven km (4 miles) southeast of the Kremlin, Reuters reported.

“Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological protection forces of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, and his assistant were killed,” the investigative committee said.

Photographs posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a shattered entrance to a building littered with rubble and two bodies lying in the blood-stained snow.

Reuters footage from the scene showed a police cordon. A criminal case has been opened.

Russia’s radioactive, chemical and biological defense troops, known as RKhBZ, are special forces who operate under conditions of radioactive, chemical and biological contamination.

On Monday, Ukrainian prosecutors charged Kirillov in absentia with the alleged use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine said, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Russia denies those accusations.

Britain in October sanctioned Kirillov and the nuclear protection forces for using riot control agents and multiple reports of the use of the toxic choking agent chloropicrin on the battlefield.