Israeli forces have killed at least 35 people in Gaza, Palestinian officials said, as brief partial pauses in fighting in central Gaza allowed doctors to conduct another day of polio vaccinations for children.
Among those killed in the past 24 hours were four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in the northern city of Gaza, Palestinian civil emergency services said Tuesday.
Later, an Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians at a house near Omar Al-Mokhtar Street in central Gaza City, medics said. Another strike took place near a university in Sheikh Radwan, a northern suburb of the city. Others were killed in airstrikes across the territory, medics said.
The Israeli military said it killed eight Palestinian gunmen, including a senior Hamas commander who took part in the October 7 attacks in Israel, at a command center near the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.
According to a statement, Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia took command of a “massacre of civilians” in the Israeli town of Netiv HaAsara, near the border with Gaza. Hamas did not immediately respond.
The armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad said they were fighting Israeli forces in the Gaza neighborhood of Zeitoun and in Rafah and Khan Younis in the south.
Polio vaccination campaign ‘ahead of targets’
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it was ahead of its polio vaccination targets in Gaza on Tuesday, the third day of a mass campaign, and had vaccinated about a quarter of Gaza’s children under 10.
After the territory’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years, a massive vaccination campaign began Sunday. The campaign is based on daily eight-hour breaks in the fighting between Israel and Hamas fighters in specific areas of the besieged enclave.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the suspension of fighting to allow children to be vaccinated as a “rare glimmer of hope and humanity in the cascade of horror,” his spokesman said.
“If the parties can act to protect children from a deadly virus, … they can and must certainly act to protect children and all innocent people from the horrors of war,” said Stéphane Dujarric.
With Gaza in ruins and the majority of its 2.3 million people forced to flee their homes by the Israeli military onslaught – often taking refuge in cramped and unsanitary conditions – disease is spreading.
Tel Aviv Tribune’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said medical teams were scouring the tents of displaced people to find children who need to be vaccinated.
“Many families lined up early in the morning to give their children extra protection with two oral drops of the polio vaccine,” he said.
“Meanwhile, areas excluded from the so-called humanitarian pause policy are suffering constant bombing,” he said.
“As a result, people in these areas are finding it difficult to bring their children to vaccination centres.”
The campaign aims to fully vaccinate more than 640,000 children in the besieged territory, devastated by nearly 11 months of war.
Polio mainly affects children under five years old and can cause deformities, paralysis and, in some cases, death.
Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Palestinian territory, said it was essential that the vaccination campaign reached at least 90% coverage to prevent the spread of the disease within Gaza’s borders and beyond.
The campaign began in the densely populated central part of the Gaza Strip, where WHO initially planned to vaccinate 156,500 children under 10 years old.
“Our target for the central area was an underestimate,” Peeperkorn said, adding that this was likely because there were more people crowded into the area than expected.
He said the vaccination campaign is expected to move to southern Gaza on Thursday with the aim of immunizing 340,000 children in that area.
The campaign will then continue to the northern Gaza Strip, where around 150,000 children are to be vaccinated.
“We still have at least 10 days left” for the initial part of the campaign, Peeperkorn said, and the rollout of the needed second dose would begin in four weeks.
According to Peeperkorn, polio vaccination campaigns are best conducted door-to-door, but they are impossible in Gaza because “there are very few houses left and people are everywhere.”
“Extremely concerned”
Peeperkorn also warned that the WHO was “extremely concerned” about the overall health situation in Gaza.
With only 16 of 36 hospitals partially operational, the Gaza Strip has seen a “huge increase in infectious diseases.”
“We have seen over a million people, mostly children, diagnosed with acute respiratory infections,” Peeperkorn said, adding that over 600,000 children have suffered from diarrhea.
Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Tel Aviv Tribune tally based on official Israeli statistics.
Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an attack on Gaza that killed at least 40,819 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian officials.