Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip killed more than a dozen people overnight into Saturday morning, hospital and local authorities said, 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 nine-day campaign run by the UN health agency and its partners began last Sunday in central Gaza and aims to vaccinate 640,000 children under the age of 10, an ambitious effort during a devastating war that has destroyed Gaza's health care system and much of its infrastructure.
The second phase of vaccinations in the southern part of the strip was in its final day 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 early Saturday.
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, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense authority, which operates under the territory’s Hamas-run government.
Violence has also spiked in the occupied West Bank, with a more than weeklong military operation in the town of Jenin leaving dozens of dead and a trail of destruction.
On Friday, a 13-year-old girl and an American protester were reported shot and killed in separate incidents in the West Bank.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26. of Seattle, who also holds Turkish nationality, died after being shot in the head on Friday, two Palestinian doctors said.
Witnesses to the shooting said she had posed no threat to Israeli forces and was shot during a moment of calm following clashes earlier in the afternoon.
The White House has said it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing and has called on Israel to investigate. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an “instigator of violent activity” in the area of the protest.
