Israeli Strikes Kill Nearly 50 in Gaza as WHO Launches Polio Vaccination Campaign
Israeli strikes killed at least 50 people in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, Palestinian health authorities said, with clashes taking place across the central and southern parts of the enclave just hours before the planned start of a polio vaccination campaign. The United Nations will start vaccinating as many as 640,000 children in the territory against polio under an agreement calling for daily eight-hour breaks in combat between Israeli forces and Hamas gunmen in parts of the embattled enclave.
Yousef Abu Al-Reesh, Gaza’s deputy minister of health, said vaccination teams would do their best to reach as many areas as possible to ensure wide coverage. Still, he said only a comprehensive ceasefire could guarantee enough children are reached. “If the international community truly wants this campaign to succeed, it should call for a ceasefire, knowing that this virus does not stop and can reach anywhere,” he told reporters at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
On Saturday, medics administered vaccines to some of the children at Nasser Hospital wards in a symbolic move before the official campaign begins. The campaign follows confirmation last week that the type 2 poliovirus partially paralyzed a baby, the first such case in the territory in 25 years. WHO officials say that if the campaign is to succeed, at least 90 percent of the children must be vaccinated twice with four weeks in between.
Still, the Gaza Strip-almost destroyed after almost eleven months of war-it does face huge obstacles. On Saturday, with more than 2,000 medical and community workers set to begin the campaign, medics in Nuseirat, one of eight historic refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, said that separate Israeli strikes killed at least 19 people, including nine members of the same family. More than 30 other people were killed in a series of strikes in other areas of Gaza, medics said.
Residents and militant sources said fighters from Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other groups clashed with Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Zeitoun neighborhood, where tanks have been operating for days, and in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
The Israeli military said in a statement it continued to operate in the central and southern Gaza Strip. It said troops killed militants and dismantled military infrastructure in Gaza City while they located weapons and killed gunmen in Tel Al-Sultan in western Rafah. In Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, families returned to their areas after the army ended a 22-day offensive it said was aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping.
Footage showed that large swaths had been reduced to flat ground, with destruction to buildings and infrastructure. Medics said they retrieved at least nine bodies from the area where the army was operating. The latest round of violence in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict began on Oct. 7 when Hamas fighters attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
The subsequent aggression by Israel on the Hamas-ruled enclave has since killed more than 40,600 Palestinians, the local health ministry claims. Almost the entire population in Gaza of 2.3 million has been internally displaced, and a hunger crisis has struck the enclave as well. At the World Court, Israel is accused of genocide – charges it denies. In the occupied West Bank, Israel continued a military operation in the city of Jenin, with drones and helicopters circling overhead and the sound of sporadic firing being heard in the city.
