Israeli military strikes killed at least 27 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Friday, medics said, as health officials resumed vaccination of tens of thousands more children in the enclave against polio.

In Nuseirat, one of the territory’s eight historic refugee camps, an Israeli airstrike killed two women and two children, while eight other people were killed in two other airstrikes in Gaza City, the medics said. The rest were killed in subsequent strikes across the enclave, they added.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces battled Hamas-led militants in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City, where residents said tanks have been operating for over a week, in eastern neighbourhoods of Khan Younis, and in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, where residents said Israeli forces blew up several houses.

Eleven months into the war, multiple rounds of diplomacy have so far failed to clinch a ceasefire deal to end the conflict and bring the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza as well as many Palestinians jailed in Israel.

The two warring sides continued to blame one another for the fruitless efforts of mediators including Qatar, Egypt and the United States. The US is preparing to present a new ceasefire proposal to hammer out differences, but prospects of a breakthrough remain dim as gaps between the sides remain wide.

On Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that it was incumbent on both Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to say yes on remaining issues to reach a Gaza ceasefire deal.

Nearly 90% of the Gaza ceasefire deal is agreed but critical issues remain where there are gaps, including the so-called Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, Blinken told a press briefing. Israel has said it will not leave the corridor; Hamas says a deal isn’t possible unless it does.

Meanwhile, residents of Khan Younis and displaced families from Rafah continued to crowd medical facilities, bringing their children to be vaccinated against polio. The campaign was launched after the discovery of a case of a one-year-old baby who was partially paralyzed.

Polio Campaign To Move To North Gaza

This was the first known case of the disease in Gaza – one of the world’s most densely populated places – in 25 years. It re-emerged as Gaza’s health system has virtually collapsed and many hospitals have been knocked out of action due to the war.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said at least 160,000 children received the drops in southern areas of Gaza on Thursday where medical staffers began the second stage of the campaign, benefiting from an Israeli and Hamas agreement on limited pauses in the fighting.

“Since 1 September @UNRWA & partners have vaccinated nearly 355,000 children against #polio in #Gaza middle & southern areas,” UNRWA said in a post on X.

“In the next few days we’ll continue rolling out the polio vaccination campaign aiming to reach around 640,000 children under 10 with this critical vaccine,” it added.

Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s Director of Communications, hailed the campaign as very welcome progress. She said UNRWA was working with UNICEF, the World Health Organization and local health partners around the clock and in a race against time to vaccinate every child across the Gaza Strip.

“These temporary pauses do not however replace our calls for a ceasefire, it’s long overdue. It’s time to reach a deal that would bring respite for the people in Gaza, release all hostages and bring in a steady flow of commercial and humanitarian supplies into Gaza,” Touma told Reuters.

The campaign will shift on Sunday to the northern Gaza Strip, which has been the focus of the major Israeli military offensive in the past 11 months. According to the World Health Organization, a second round of vaccinations would be required four weeks after the first round.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered last Oct. 7 when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has since killed over 40,800 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.

According to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people – or nine in 10 -across the Gaza Strip are internally displaced, including people who have uprooted up to 10 times or more.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Gaza:

Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, the Palestinian health ministry said on Friday, after UN chief Antonio Guterres called for pauses in the Israel-Hamas war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children.

Tests in Jordan confirmed the disease in an unvaccinated 10-month-old from the central Gaza Strip, the health ministry in Ramallah said.

According to the United Nations, Gaza, now in its 11th month of war, has not registered a polio case for 25 years, although type 2 poliovirus was detected in samples collected from the territory’s wastewater in June.

“Doctors suspected the presence of symptoms consistent with polio,” the health ministry said. “After conducting the necessary tests in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the infection was confirmed.”

The case emerged shortly after Guterres called for two seven-day breaks in the Gaza war to vaccinate more than 640,000 children.

Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious. It can cause deformities and paralysis and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.

The UN health and children’s agencies said they had made detailed plans to reach children across the besieged Palestinian territory and could start this month.

But that would require pauses in the 10-month old war between Israel and Hamas, they said.

“Preventing and containing the spread of polio will take a massive, coordinated and urgent effort,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.

“I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign.”

The World Health Organization and UN children’s fund UNICEF said they were planning two seven-day vaccination drives across the Gaza Strip, starting in late August, against type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2).

Last month, it was announced that type 2 poliovirus had been detected in samples collected in Gaza on June 23.

“These pauses in fighting would allow children and families to safely reach health facilities and community outreach workers to get to children who cannot access health facilities for polio vaccination,” the agencies said in a statement said.

Regional public health issue

After 25 years without polio, its re-emergence in the Gaza Strip would threaten neighbouring countries, it added.

“A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in the Gaza Strip and the region.”

During each round of the campaign, the health ministry in Gaza, alongside UN agencies, would provide “two drops of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) to more than 640,000 children under 10 years of age”.

More than 1.6 million doses of nOPV2 were expected to transit through Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport “by the end of August”, the statement added.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

On Thursday, the toll from Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza passed 40,000, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and Hamas casualties.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)