Gaza conflict: 35 killed in attacks as child vaccinations advance

Israeli forces have killed at least 35 people in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials, as brief lulls in fighting allowed doctors to continue vaccinating children against polio in central Gaza.

Among the victims 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 City, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said on Tuesday (3).

Later, an Israeli airstrike hit a house near Omar Al-Mokhtar Street in Gaza City, killing nine Palestinians, according to local medics. Another strike hit an area near a college in Sheikh Radwan, a northern suburb of the city. Medics reported other deaths in airstrikes across the territory.

The Israeli military said it killed eight Palestinian militants, 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 led a “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.

Despite heavy fighting, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it was surpassing targets for its polio vaccination campaign in Gaza on the third day of a mass drive, inoculating around a quarter of children under 10 in the territory.

After the first confirmed case of polio in 25 years in the region, the vaccination campaign began on Sunday. The operation depends on daily eight-hour pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas fighters in specific areas of the besieged enclave.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres described the pauses in fighting to allow children to be vaccinated as a “rare ray of hope and humanity amid the cascade of horror,” according to his spokesman.

“If parties can act to protect children from a deadly virus, then surely they can and must act to protect children and all innocents from the horrors of war,” said Stephane Dujarric.

With Gaza devastated and most of its 2.3 million inhabitants forced from their homes by the Israeli military assault, often taking refuge in poor and unsanitary conditions, the disease spread.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said medical teams were going through displaced people’s tents to find children who needed to be vaccinated.

“Many families organized early in the morning to ensure their children received the additional protection of two oral drops of the polio vaccine,” he reported.

“Meanwhile, areas outside the so-called humanitarian pauses continue to suffer sustained shelling,” he added. “As a result, people in these areas are struggling to get their children to vaccination centers.”

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

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

Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Palestinian territory, stressed that it is vital that the vaccination campaign reaches at least 90% coverage to prevent the spread of the disease inside and outside Gaza.

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

“We underestimated our target for the central zone,” Peeperkorn said, suggesting this was because there were more people concentrated in the area than anticipated.

He mentioned that the vaccination campaign will be moved to southern Gaza on Thursday, with the aim of immunizing 340,000 children in the region.

The campaign will then move to the northern part of the Strip, where around 150,000 children will be vaccinated.

“We have at least 10 days left for the initial phase of the campaign,” Peeperkorn said, and distribution of the required second dose will begin in four weeks.

While polio vaccinations are most effective in house-to-house campaigns, Peeperkorn stressed that this is impossible in Gaza, where “there are very few houses left and people are everywhere.”

“Extremely worrying”

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

With only 16 of 36 hospitals operational, the Strip has witnessed a “significant increase in infectious diseases.”

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

Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,139 people, most of them civilians, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics.

Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that Palestinian officials say has killed at least 40,819 people, most of them women and children.