Israeli attacks in Gaza kill 35 as polio vaccinations continue

Palestinian officials said Israeli forces killed at least 35 people in the Gaza Strip as brief and partial lulls in fighting in central Gaza allowed doctors to carry out another day of polio vaccinations for children.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said on Tuesday that the deaths in the past 24 hours included four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in the northern city of Gaza.

Later, an Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians in a house near Omar Al-Mokhtar Street in central Gaza City, medics said. Another attack occurred near a college 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 militants, including a senior Hamas commander involved in the October 7 attacks in Israel, at a command center near the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.

The statement said Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia took command of the “massacre of civilians” in the Israeli community of Netiv HaAsara near the Gaza border. There was no immediate response from Hamas.

The armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad reported fighting with Israeli forces in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, as well as in Rafah and Khan Younis in the south.

Polio vaccination campaign ‘exceeds targets’

Still, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday, the third day of a massive campaign, it had exceeded its polio vaccination targets in Gaza and vaccinated about a quarter of children under the age of 10 in Gaza.

Following the first confirmed case of polio in the territory in 25 years, a mass vaccination drive began Sunday. The campaign involves daily eight-hour breaks in fighting between Israel and Hamas fighters in specific areas of the besieged enclave.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the suspension of fighting to allow childhood vaccinations as “a rare glimmer of hope and humanity amidst an avalanche of horror,” his spokesman said.

“If the parties can act to protect children from a deadly virus, … they certainly can and must act to protect children and all innocent people from the atrocities of war,” Stephane Dujarric said.

As Gaza lies in ruins and most of its 2.3 million people forced from their homes by the Israeli military onslaught – often seeking refuge in cramped and unsanitary conditions – disease is spreading.

Al-Jazeera journalist Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, said medical teams were patrolling the tents of displaced people, looking for children who needed vaccinated.

“Many families lined up from early morning to provide their children with the extra protection of two oral drops of the polio vaccine,” he said.

“Meanwhile, areas excluded from the so-called humanitarian pause policy are subjected to relentless bombing,” he said.

“As a result, residents of these areas are having difficulty ensuring that their children have access to vaccination centres.”

The campaign aims to fully vaccinate more than 640,000 children in the besieged territory, devastated by almost 11 months of war.

Polio mainly attacks children under the age of five and can cause deformities, paralysis, and in some cases death.

Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative in the Palestinian territories, said it was crucial to achieve vaccination coverage of at least 90 percent to prevent the spread of the disease both within and outside the Gaza Strip.

The campaign began in the central part of the densely populated Gaza Strip, where WHO initially planned to vaccinate 156,500 children under the age of 10.

“Our target for the central zone was underestimated,” Peeperkorn said, adding that this was likely due to more people being crowded into the area than expected.

He added that on Thursday the vaccination campaign is to be moved to the southern part of the Gaza Strip, with the aim of vaccinating 340,000 children there.

The facility is then to move north of the Zone, where about 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 administration of the necessary second dose will begin in four weeks.

Polio vaccinations are best carried out through house-to-house campaigns, Peeperkorn said, but that is impossible in Gaza because “there are very few houses left and people are everywhere.”

“I am extremely concerned”

Peeperkorn also warned that the WHO was “extremely concerned” about the wider health situation in Gaza.

With only 16 of 36 hospitals partially operational, the Strip has seen a “huge increase in infectious disease cases.”

“We have seen more than a million children diagnosed with acute respiratory infections,” Peeperkorn said, adding that more than 600,000 children suffered from diarrhea.

Israel launched its attack on Gaza after Hamas launched an Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, killing at least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics.

Promising to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an attack on Gaza that killed at least 40,819 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.