Israeli strikes claim dozen lives in Gaza

The Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip killed more than a dozen people overnight on Saturday morning as health workers were wrapping up the second phase of an urgent polio vaccination campaign designed to prevent a large-scale outbreak in the territory, the hospital and local authorities said.

The vaccination drive was launched after health officials confirmed the first polio case in the Palestinian enclave in 25 years, in a 10-month-old boy whose leg is now paralysed. The nine-day campaign run by the UN health agency and its partners began on last Sunday in central Gaza and aims to vaccinate 6,40,000 children under the age of 10, an ambitious effort during a devastating war that has destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system and much of its infrastructure.

The second phase of vaccinations in the southern part of the strip was in its final day on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry said, before moving to the north and concluding on Monday. The ministry designated dozens of points across the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah for people to visit with their children to receive the vaccines.

Israel meanwhile kept up its military offensive. In central Gaza’s urban refugee camp of Nuseirat, Al-Awda Hospital said it had received the bodies of nine people killed in two separate air raids. One had hit a residential building in the early hours of Saturday, killing four people and wounding at least 10, the hospital said, while another five people were killed in a strike on a house in the western part of Nuseirat.

Separately, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, central Gaza’s main hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah, said a woman and her two children were killed in another strike on a house in the nearby urban refugee camp of Bureij. In the northern part of the Gaza Strip, an airstrike on a school-turned-shelter for displaced people in the town of Jabaliya killed at least four people and wounded about two dozen others, said Gaza’s civil defence authority, which operates under the territory’s Hamas-run government.

The war began when Hamas and other militants staged a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 people, primarily civilians. Hamas is believed to still be holding more than 100 hostages. Israeli authorities estimate about a third are dead.