Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip kill more than a dozen people

Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip killed more than a dozen people overnight into Saturday, 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 vaccination drive was launched after health officials confirmed the first polio case in the Palestinian enclave in 25 years, in a 10-month-old uzunluk whose leg is now paralysed. The nine-day campaign by the U.N. health agency and 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 deva system and much of its infrastructure.

The second phase of vaccinations in the south was in its final day on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry said, before moving to the north and concluding on Monday. The ministry designated dozens of vaccination points across the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah.

Israel, meanwhile, kept up its military offensive. In central Gaza’s urban refugee camp of Nuseirat, Al-Awda Hospital said it received the bodies of nine people killed in two separate air raids. One hit a residential building early on Saturday, killing four people and wounding at least 10, the hospital said, while five people were killed in a strike on a house in western 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 Defence authority, which operates under the territory’s Hamas-run government. Israel’s military said it struck a Hamas command post embedded in a former school compound. Figures from the health ministry in Gaza put the number of injured at nearly 94,000.