At least 27 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip on Friday, doctors said, as health authorities resumed vaccinating thousands of children in the region against polio.
The medics said two women and two children were killed in an Israeli air strike on Nuseirat, one of eight historic refugee camps in the region, while two other airstrikes in Gaza City killed eight others. The rest were killed in later attacks across the region, they said.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces battled Hamas-led militants in the Gaza City suburb of Zeitoun, where residents said tanks had been operating for more than a week, in the eastern neighbourhoods of Khan Younis and in Rafah near the Egyptian border, where residents said Israeli forces blew up several homes.
Eleven months into the war, several rounds of diplomacy have so far failed to reach a ceasefire agreement to end the conflict and secure the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza as well as many Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
The two warring sides continue to blame each other for the futile efforts of mediators including Qatar, Egypt and the United States. The US is preparing to present a new ceasefire proposal to resolve differences, but the prospects of success remain bleak as differences between the two sides are still huge.
On Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said reaching a Gaza ceasefire deal required both Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to say yes on the remaining issues.
Blinken told a press briefing that the Gaza ceasefire deal has been agreed to at least 90%, but significant issues remain where there are gaps, including in the so-called Philadelphia corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Israel has said it will not leave the corridor; Hamas says a deal is not possible until it does.
Meanwhile, residents of Khan Younis and displaced families from Rafah flocked to medical facilities to have their children vaccinated against polio, a campaign launched after the discovery of a case of a one-year-old child who was partially paralysed.
Polio campaign to be launched in northern Gaza
It was the first known case of the disease in Gaza – one of the world’s most densely populated places – in 25 years. The disease re-emerged at a time when Gaza’s health system had nearly collapsed and many hospitals had closed because of the war.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said at least 160,000 children were given medicines on Thursday in southern Gaza, where medical staff launched the second phase of an operation that is benefiting from an agreement between Israel and Hamas on a limited pause in fighting.
“Since 1 September, @UNRWA and partners have vaccinated nearly 355,000 children against #polio in central and southern areas of #Gaza,” UNRWA said in a post on X.
“Over the next few days, we will continue our polio vaccination campaign, aiming to reach approximately 640,000 children under the age of 10 with this vital vaccine,” it said.
UNRWA Communications Director Juliette Touma described the campaign as a very welcome development. She said UNRWA, in collaboration with UNICEF, the World Health Organization and local health partners, is working around the clock in a race to vaccinate every child in the Gaza Strip.
“These temporary pauses cannot replace our call for a ceasefire, which is long overdue. Now is the time to reach an agreement that will bring relief to the people in Gaza, release all hostages and allow the continued flow of commercial and humanitarian supplies into Gaza,” Touma told Reuters.
On Sunday, the campaign will shift to the northern Gaza Strip, which has been the focus of a major Israeli military offensive over the past 11 months. According to the World Health Organization, a second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first round of vaccination.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict began last October 7, when Hamas-led militants stormed Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s assault on Hamas-ruled territory has so far killed more than 40,800 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while almost the entire population of 2.3 million has been displaced, leading to a starvation crisis and World Court charges of genocide, which Israel denies.
According to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people in the Gaza Strip – or nine out of 10 – are internally displaced, including those who have been displaced 10 or more times.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
