Israeli military strikes killed at least 27 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Friday, medics said, as health officials resumed vaccination of tens of thousands more children in the enclave against polio.
In Nuseirat, one of the territory’s eight historic refugee camps, an Israeli air strike killed two women and two children, while eight other people were killed in two other airstrikes in Gaza City, the medics said. The rest were killed in subsequent strikes across the enclave, they added.
Separately, a dual US-Turkish citizen taking part in a protest against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank died of her wounds on Friday after reportedly being shot in the head by Israeli troops.
Both the US state department and Turkey’s foreign ministry confirmed the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi (26). The Turkish ministry said she was killed by Israeli soldiers and described the incident as a “murder carried out by the Netanyahu government”.
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The Israeli military said it was looking into “reports of that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review”.
The White House said in a statement it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing of a US citizen.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces battled Hamas-led fighters in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City, where residents said tanks have been operating for over a week, in eastern Khan Younis, and in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, where residents said Israeli forces blew up several houses.
Eleven months into the war, diplomacy has so far failed to conclude a ceasefire deal to end the conflict and bring the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza as well as many Palestinians jailed in Israel.
The two warring sides continued to blame one another for failing efforts by mediators, including Qatar, Egypt and the United States. The US is preparing to present a new ceasefire proposal to hammer out differences, but prospects of a breakthrough remain dim as gaps between the sides remain large.
On Thursday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that it was incumbent on both Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to say yes on remaining issues to reach a Gaza ceasefire deal.
Nearly 90 per cent of the Gaza ceasefire deal is agreed, but critical issues remain where there are gaps, including the issue of the so-called Philadelphi corridor on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt, Mr Blinken said at a press briefing.
Israel said it would not leave the corridor and Hamas says an agreement isn’t possible unless they did.
Residents of Khan Younis and displaced families from Rafah, continued to crowd medical facilities on Friday, bringing their children to get the polio vaccines. The campaign was launched after the discovery of a case of a one-year-old baby who was partially paralysed.
This was the first known case of the disease in Gaza – one of the world’s most densely populated places – in 25 years. It re-emerged as Gaza’s health system has virtually collapsed and many hospitals have been knocked out of action due to the war.
The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa, said at least 160,000 children received the drops in southern Gaza areas on Thursday where medical staffers began the second stage of the campaign, benefiting from an Israeli and Hamas agreement on limited pauses in the fighting.
The campaign will move on Sunday to the northern Gaza Strip, which has been the focus of the major Israeli military offensive in the past 11 months. According to the World Health Organisation, a second round of vaccination would be required four weeks after the first round.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7th, 2023, when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has since killed over 40,800 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
Elsewhere on Friday, Israeli forces pulled out of the Palestinian city of Jenin, leaving a mass of damaged buildings and infrastructure, following one of the biggest security operations in the occupied West Bank in months.
Thousands of residents were displaced from their homes during the nine-day operation, during which troops fought running gun battles with Palestinian fighters from factions including Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah.
Water and electricity services remain cut and around 20km of roadway was dug up by Israeli bulldozers, a tactic the military said was aimed at neutralising roadside bombs but which has ripped up much of the centre of the city.
A statement from the military said 30 explosives planted under the roads had been dismantled.
Jenin, in the northern part of the West Bank, has long been a stronghold of Palestinian armed factions, and the Israeli military said the operation, which also targeted the city of Tulkarm, was aimed at thwarting Iranian-backed militant groups planning attacks on Israeli civilians.
It said troops had killed 14 militant fighters during the operation, including the local commander of Hamas in Jenin. Forces also arrested 30 suspects and confiscated weapons and dismantled infrastructure including an underground weapons storage depot underneath a mosque and an explosives workshop.
While the Israeli military’s main focus over most of the past year has been in Gaza, the West Bank has seen a surge in violence, with repeated clashes between the military and Palestinian fighters as well as raids by Jewish settlers on Palestinian villages and attacks by Palestinians on Israelis.
More than 680 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Palestinian health ministry figures. Many have been armed fighters but others have been youths throwing stones at protests or civilians with no involvement in the violence.
In the same period, dozens of Israeli civilians have been killed in attacks by Palestinians or in rocket and missile attacks from the Iranian-backed Hizbullah in southern Lebanon. – Reuters