Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip killed at least 61 people in the space of 48 hours, local medics said on Saturday (7), as Israeli forces battled Hamas-led militants in the territory.
After eleven months of war and numerous rounds of negotiations, Israeli leaders and Hamas have failed to reach a ceasefire agreement to end the conflict and free the hostages held in Gaza, as well as many Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
An Israeli airstrike on the Halima al-Sa’diyya school complex, which serves as a shelter for displaced people in the Jabalia urban refugee camp, killed at least eight people and wounded 15 others, medics said.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted a Hamas command center inside the compound. And it accused Hamas of repeatedly exploiting civilians and civilian infrastructure for military purposes, an allegation Hamas denies.
Five more people were killed in an attack on a house in Gaza City.
The armed wings of the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah groups said they fought Israeli troops in Gaza City, the central areas and the south with anti-tank rockets and mortars, and in some incidents detonated bombs against tanks and other army vehicles.
The two warring sides continued to blame each other for the failure of mediators, including Qatar, Egypt and the United States, to broker a ceasefire. The United States is preparing to present a new proposal, but prospects for a breakthrough appear dim as disparities between the parties remain wide.
CIA Director William Burns, the head of the US negotiating team, told an event in London that a more detailed proposal would be made in the coming days.
Pauses in combat allow vaccination
On Thursday (5), US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it was up to Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which ruled Gaza before the war and was responsible for the October 7 wave of killings against Jews in Israel that triggered it, to make concessions to reach an agreement.
On Saturday (7), senior Hamas official Hossam Badran said the group made no new demands and remained committed to a July 2 proposal put forward by the United States, accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of imposing new conditions that would not end the war.
Netanyahu says it was Hamas that introduced unacceptable conditions.
Despite the impasse, the United Nations, in collaboration with local health authorities, carried out a campaign to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza after the first polio case in nearly 25 years. Limited lulls in the fighting allowed the campaign to continue.
UN officials said they were making progress, having reached more than half of the children needing the shots in the first two phases in the southern and central Gaza Strip.
On Sunday (8), the campaign will move to the northern Gaza Strip. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7 when the Hamas group attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli records.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the enclave killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a famine and prompting allegations of genocide, which Israel denies.
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This content was originally published in Israeli attacks on Gaza kill 61 amid polio vaccination campaign on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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