Israeli forces killed 35 Palestinians across Gaza on Tuesday as they battled Hamas-led militants, Palestinian officials said on Tuesday, but brief pauses in fighting allowed medics to conduct a third day of polio vaccinations for children.
Among those killed were four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in Gaza City in the north, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said.
Later on Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians inside a house in the middle of Gaza City, medics said. Another strike hit near a college in Sheikh Radwan, a northern suburb of the city. The Israeli military said the strike targeted Hamas militants operating from a command center embedded inside the former Nama College.
Others were killed in separate air strikes across the territory, medics said.
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The Israeli military said it killed eight Palestinian gunmen, including a senior Hamas commander who took part in the October 7th attacks in Israel, at a command centre near the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. A statement said Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia had taken command of a “massacre of civilians carried out by Hamas terrorists” in Israel’s Netiv HaAsara community near the Gaza border. There was no response from Hamas.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they were battling Israeli forces in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City, and also in Rafah and Khan Younis in the south.
Nevertheless, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that it was ahead of its targets for polio vaccinations in Gaza on Tuesday, day three of a mass campaign, and had inoculated about a quarter of children under 10. The campaign, which was hastened by the discovery of the first polio case in a Gazan baby last month, relies on daily eight-hour pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in specific areas of the besieged enclave.
Diplomatic efforts to secure a permanent ceasefire and release foreign and Israeli hostages held in Gaza and return many Palestinians jailed by Israel have stalled, however.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israeli troops would remain in the Philadelphi corridor on the southern edge of Gaza, one of the main sticking points in reaching a deal to end the fighting and return hostages. He described it as “Hamas’s oxygen pipe”.
Hamas, which wants an agreement to end the war and see Israeli forces out of all of the Gaza Strip, says such a condition, among some others, would prevent a deal.
Mr Netanyahu says war can only end when Hamas is eradicated.
The United Nations, in collaboration with the local health authorities, embarked on the third day of a complex campaign to vaccinate around 640,000 children in Gaza.
United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres described pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza to allow children to be vaccinated against polio as a “rare ray of hope and humanity in the cascade of horror,” his spokesman said. “If the parties can act to protect children from a deadly virus ... surely they can and must act to protect children and all innocents from the horrors of war,” the spokesman said.
Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters more than 161,000 children under 10 had been vaccinated in the central area in the first two days of the campaign.
“Up until now things are going well,” he said. “These humanitarian pauses, up until now they work. We still have 10 days to go.” He said that some children in southern Gaza were thought to be outside the agreed zone for the pauses and that negotiations continued in order to reach them.
Palestinians say a key reason for the return of polio is the collapse of the health system and the destruction of most Gaza hospitals. Israel accuses Hamas of using hospitals for military purposes, which the Islamist group denies.
The war in Gaza was triggered by the Hamas assault in southern Israel on October 7th, when its fighters killed 1,200 people and captured more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, more than 40,800 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, the enclave’s health ministry said on Monday.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces killed three people including a 16-year-old Palestinian girl in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, as a major Israeli operation in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm continued for a seventh day.
The girl was killed in the town of Kafr Dan, just outside Jenin, where Israeli troops have been operating for days and where they demolished a house. The military gave no immediate details of the incident but said it was looking into the report.
Two Palestinians were also killed in the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said.
- Reuters