Hours before families in Gaza lined up on Thursday to begin the second phase of an emergency polio vaccination campaign, a deadly Israeli airstrike struck near a hospital in the area that had just finished its previous vaccination drive.
Health officials have hailed the vaccination programme, which began on Sunday and was built around a deal between Israel and Hamas to halt fighting for a short time, as an unexpected success in its early stages. The World Health Organization said the first phase, in the central Gaza Strip, ended on Wednesday and the second phase, in southern Gaza, began on Thursday.
But the limited nature of those pauses was highlighted by the overnight attack, which killed four people and wounded several others, including women and children, according to Wafa, the official Palestinian Authority news agency. Witnesses said it fell on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, where displaced civilians had taken shelter.
Photos and video taken by Reuters news agency showed flattened tents and makeshift shelters at the site, with tarpaulins, clothes and other items scattered on the ground outside the hospital, one of the largest in Gaza.
“We sought shelter in a safe place, in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, to be displaced and sleep peacefully, we saw nothing but airstrikes hitting us,” a woman named Iqbal Al-Zeidi told Reuters.
The Israeli military confirmed the air strike, which was said to have been carried out by attack helicopters, but did not give a death toll or the location of the hospital. It said it had struck a Hamas command centre to “eliminate an immediate threat” that was “embedded” in a humanitarian area in Deir al-Balah.
“Numerous steps have been taken to minimize the risk of harm to civilians, including the use of precision munitions” and aerial surveillance, the statement said, echoing words the military often uses after airstrikes in Gaza.
The charity Doctors Without Borders said it was the fifth time since March that the hospital or surrounding area had been attacked.
Israel agree to short, alternating pauses during the military offensive in Gaza to allow health officials to carry out an emergency campaign to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children and stop a deadly polio outbreak. The first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years was confirmed last month in a boy less than a year old.
Mediators from the Biden administration, Egypt and Qatar have been trying for months to reach a lasting cease-fire, but talks have stalled amid multiple disagreements between Israel and Hamas.
For weeks, the talks have been bogged down in the issue of Israel’s postwar military presence in Gaza. But US officials say another issue has emerged as a sticking point: the release of hostages held in Gaza and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
US officials said the two sides have yet to agree on how many people each side will release, or on the list of those released during the first six-week phase of the ceasefire.
“The talks delved into the most difficult issues, some of which are not prominent in public discussion,” said Jack Lew, the US ambassador to Israel. said on thursday at the Institute for National Security Studies, an independent research center in Tel Aviv.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country’s forces must maintain control of a strip of Gaza along the border with Egypt to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons into Gaza. The strip, known as the Philadelphia Corridor, will remain under Israeli military control during the first six-week phase of a proposed ceasefire, but Netanyahu said on Wednesday that its control would will probably last much longer.
Hamas says a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is central to any ceasefire. Egypt says an Israeli military presence in the corridor would violate the two countries’ security agreement.
But Mr Netanyahu has dismissed the suggestion that the Philadelphia Corridor is the main obstacle, accusing Hamas of being stubborn.
“In fact, while we agreed in May, July and August on an agreement and an American proposal, Hamas kept saying no to all of those proposals,” Netanyahu said in a speech. interview with “Fox and Friends” airing Thursday. “They didn’t agree to anything, not with the Philadelphia Corridor, not with the key to the hostage exchange for jailed terrorists, not with anything, so it’s just a false story.”
Complicating the delicate issue was the killing of six hostages whose bodies were recovered by Israeli forces from Gaza over the weekend, an event that has sparked public outrage in Israel and added pressure on Netanyahu to make a deal. The Israeli military said the hostages were killed by Hamas.
On Thursday, Hamas released a video of one of those six hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin., an Israeli-American, with footage recorded while he was still alive. This is the fourth day in a row that Hamas has released footage of one or more of the six hostages.
Mr. Goldberg-Polin’s parents, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, issued a statement saying, “This must be an immediate wake-up call to the world to act today to ensure the rescue of the remaining 101 hostages before it is too late.”
The latest video release ensures that The fate of dozens of remaining prisonershas deeply divided Israel, remains the focus of public attention.
This week, President Biden suggested that Netanyahu had not done enough to bring the hostages back, and US officials said both sides had raised barriers to a deal.
But in public, US officials have largely blamed Hamas for delaying the talks. At the White House on Wednesday, a senior US official speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity said the hostage killings not only injected a “sense of urgency” into the talks but also “raised questions about Hamas’s willingness to make any deal.”
The talks come as Israel battles on at least two other fronts, with Hezbollah militants on the border with Lebanon and raids in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, stretching into a ninth day on Thursday.
Israeli airstrikes killed five Palestinians in the Tubas area, a small town in the northern West Bank. The Israeli airstrikes killed at least 39 people and wounded 145 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, as well as destroying homes, roads, power lines, water and internet.
Israel described the raids as an effort to crack down on Palestinian militant groups and counter growing attacks on Israelis. The Israeli military said Thursday’s airstrikes near Tubas targeted armed militants who threw explosives and fired at security forces.
Violence has flared in the West Bank since Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on October 7, which left some 1,200 people dead, and Israel’s devastating bombing campaign and subsequent invasion. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in that time in the West Bank, according to the United Nationsas Israel has stepped up military attacks there and violence by extremist Jewish settlers has increased.
US officials hope that a ceasefire in Gaza could ease tensions across the region, including the West Bank and southern Lebanon.
Israel is deeply divided between those who want a ceasefire to rescue the hostages and those who want the army to continue pursuing and destroying Hamas. Even brief pauses in fighting for the vaccination campaign have been met with some backlash in Israel.
In the first phase of the vaccination campaign, WHO vaccinated more than 187,000 children in central Gaza over three days. The second phase, which began Thursday in southern Gaza, is scheduled to last three days. The third and final phase is planned for northern Gaza.
The effort aims to vaccinate a total of about 640,000 children under the age of 10 against the disease, with the plan to give each child a second dose next month.
Health officials say the war has created conditions for a resurgence of polio, which is spread through contact with feces. Much of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the war, and countless families live in cramped tents with little access to sewage or clean water.
The World Health Organization said the vaccination program had surpassed its initial target of 30,000 children, as more than 2,180 staff went to hospitals, temporary schools and camps for displaced people, visiting tents and areas destroyed by nearly 11 months of fighting.
King Abdulrahim And Rawan Sheikh Ahmad Contribute report.
