At least eight people have been killed and dozens injured as Israel carries out airstrikes across Gaza, Palestinian health officials say.
At least eight people have been killed and dozens injured in Israeli attacks across Gaza, health officials said, as Israel ordered some residents of northern Gaza to evacuate their homes.
Health officials said two Israeli airstrikes on Monday killed seven people in central Gaza and another strike killed a man in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
The armed wings of Palestinian groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad said they fought Israeli forces in several areas of the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.
The Israeli military said its forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure and had killed dozens of Palestinian fighters in recent days, including senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders.
The Palestinian Health Ministry announced on Monday that at least 40,988 Palestinians have been killed and 94,825 injured in Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave since October 2016. In attacks by Hamas on southern Israel on October 7, 1,139 people were killed.
Earlier, the Israeli military ordered Palestinians in a neighborhood of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza to evacuate after it said rockets were fired from the area toward the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Sunday night.
The army spokesman released a map demarcating the area, adding that “the specified area has been the subject of warnings several times in the past” and is now “considered a dangerous combat zone.”
The Israeli military had earlier said that one of the rockets had been intercepted and another had fallen into the sea.
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced to leave their homes at least once, and some have had to flee more than ten times.
According to Tel Aviv Tribune’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, based in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, residents of the northern Gaza Strip have received new evacuation orders, but have no other place to go and are simply moving from one neighborhood to another.
Polio vaccination campaign
Among the latest evacuation orders, the United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to go to medical centers to vaccinate children under 10 against polio.
Limited pauses in the fighting have been observed to allow the rollout of the vaccination campaign, which aims to reach 640,000 children in Gaza after the territory’s first case of polio in about 25 years.
According to UN officials, the campaign in southern and central Gaza has already vaccinated more than half of the children involved. A second round of vaccinations will be needed four weeks after the first.
Juliette Touma of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) told Reuters news agency on Monday that 450,000 of the children targeted by the campaign had been vaccinated.
“Tuesday is the hardest day to start the campaign in the north. I hope it works out so we can finish the first stage of the campaign. The second and final stage is scheduled for the end of the month, when we will have to start all over again,” Touma said.
A dark return to school
The new school year officially began in the Palestinian territories on Monday. But more than 630,000 students were unable to attend school as all schools in Gaza remained closed.
The Palestinian Education Ministry said 90 percent of Gaza’s schools were destroyed or damaged in the Israeli attack on the territory.
“The longer children stay out of school, the harder it is for them to catch up and the more likely they are to become a lost generation, subject to exploitation, including early marriage, child labour and recruitment into armed groups,” Touma said.
Hamas said in a statement that the denial of 630,000 students of their right to education is a “deliberate violation of all rights stipulated by international laws, which leaves the responsibility to the international community and UN agencies to put an end to these crimes.”