Middle East Crisis: Airstrikes Resume in Central Gaza as Polio Campaign Enters New Phase

The strike near the hospital, in the city of Deir al-Balah, killed four people and wounded a number of others, including women and children, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.

Witnesses said it landed among some of the makeshift shelters on the hospital grounds that were being used by people who had fled their homes. Video taken by the Reuters news agency showed tents and shelters in ruins, their wooden beams flattened, and people’s belongings strewed outside the hospital, one of Gaza’s largest.

“We sought refuge in a safe place, in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, displaced and sleeping peacefully, we found nothing but the airstrikes hitting us,” one woman, Iqbal Al-Zeidi, told Reuters.

The Israeli military confirmed the strike, but not the death toll or the proximity to the hospital. It said it had struck a Hamas command center overnight to “remove an immediate threat,” which was “embedded” within a humanitarian area in Deir al-Balah.

“Numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions” and aerial surveillance, the statement said, echoing words often employed by the military after airstrikes in Gaza.

The charitable group Doctors Without Borders said it was the fifth time since March that the hospital or its surroundings had been hit.

In the first phase of the vaccination campaign, the W.H.O. inoculated more than 187,000 children over three days. The second phase was expected to take place in southern Gaza over the next three days, before a third and final phase in northern Gaza. The effort aims to vaccinate a total of about 640,000 children under 10 against the disease, after the first polio case in Gaza in 25 years was recorded in a nearly 1-year-old boy last month.

The war in Gaza created the conditions for a resurgence of polio, said Juliette Touma, the director of communications for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that helps Palestinians in Gaza. Displaced people were living in cramped tents with little access to clean water, she added.

“These are conditions unfit for humans,” she said.

The W.H.O., which is also a U.N. agency, said it had exceeded its target for the first phase by 30,000 children, as more than 2,180 workers fanned out across hospitals, temporary schools and camps for displaced people, visiting tents and areas destroyed by nearly 11 months of fighting.

The initial success of the vaccine campaign reflected a culture of acceptance around vaccinations that was fostered by Gaza’s health care system before the war, Ms. Touma said. The brief pause in fighting, she said, allowed health workers to reach children who are vulnerable to the lifelong effects of polio.

“For six or seven hours there was respite, finally, for people. We knew that our clinics weren’t going to be attacked or bombed because of the pause,” she said. “The mobile teams who move tent to tent were going to be safe, and the culture and vaccines were going to be safe, and that certainly helped.”

The pauses were instrumental in convincing parents that it would be safe to bring their children to the vaccination centers, said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency. Before the vaccinations began, aid agencies worked with communities to allay Gazans’ fears and stop disinformation about the vaccines. For the next phase of vaccinations, it would be critical that those pauses were respected, he added.

The war has destroyed three quarters of the cold storage and transport infrastructure that medics would normally rely on to keep the vaccine at a stable temperature, Mr. Crickx said. The W.H.O. and its partners spent at least two weeks identifying what cold storage remained in Gaza, and brought ice boxes and packs to preserve the doses.

Some members of Israel’s Parliament have criticized the W.H.O. for working on the effort with UNRWA. The Israeli government has accused employees of the agency of having ties to Hamas. Last month, the U.N. fired nine UNRWA workers after it said an internal investigation had found they “may have been involved” in the Hamas-led attack in Israel last October that touched off the war.

As the United States and others pushed for the polio campaign to proceed, Israel agreed last week to the brief pauses in fighting, while insisting they were not a prelude to a full cease-fire in Gaza. That decision has faced some pushback in Israel. An opposition lawmaker, Yulia Malinovsky, argued that even the limited humanitarian pauses would be beneficial to Hamas, allowing its fighters to regroup.

“Why should we care about an entity that has kidnapped our people and is holding them in conditions that the soul cannot contain?” Ms. Malinovsky said on social media on Wednesday.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed research.

Such raids have become a near-daily reality for the nearly three million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed there since the Hamas-led attack on Israel last October, both in military strikes and at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers, according to the United Nations.

Palestinian armed groups have claimed some of those killed in the ongoing Israeli raids as members. None claimed those killed in Far’a as members, and in a statement Hamas referred to them as “residents.”

The nine days of military raids have taken an exceptional toll on Palestinians in several towns and cities, especially Jenin and Tulkarm, where many residents have trapped in their homes for days, saying that Israeli forces are operating outside their doors with armored vehicles. Bulldozers have ripped up entire streets — in what the Israeli military calls an effort to unearth improvised explosives planted by armed groups — and snipers have taken up positions on rooftops and inside homes, residents have said.

For five days, Kafah Abu Sarur, 49, and his family could not leave their home in the eastern part of Jenin as Israeli forces were spread through the streets. Their neighborhood has been raided before, including six months ago when Israeli soldiers stormed into their home and ransacked it, he said.

“But this is the first time we see this kind of brutality,” said Mr. Abu Sarur, a father of seven, in an interview Thursday. “There is no humanity. They uprooted the trees, broke the buildings. The sewer mains meters under the ground, they ripped them up. The electricity, the water — they didn’t leave anything untouched.”

A few days ago, he said, Israeli forces withdrew to the outskirts of their neighborhood. Mr. Abu Sarur ventured outside to get food and water for his family, his brother’s family and his parents, all of whom live in the same building.

He found that the shops had been destroyed. With the roads impassable for vehicles, he saw volunteers bringing bread and other food into the neighborhood on foot.

The Israeli military remains in other parts of the city, he said, including the neighborhood known as Jenin camp, which originated as a refugee camp for Palestinians who fled there after the creation of Israel in 1948 and is now a regular target of Israel’s military raids.

Mr. Abu Sarur said his family was terrified that Israeli soldiers would return, and they all stay fully dressed at night in case troops storm in.

Israeli soldiers entered Tulkarm again Thursday after briefly withdrawing from it hours earlier, said Faisal Salameh, head of the services committee in Tulkarm camp, a neighborhood of the city. For residents who had been trapped in their homes for days, it was not enough time for them to step out to get provisions or check on loved ones.

“No one had a chance to get anything done,” Mr. Salameh said. “The occupation left but returned quickly.”

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

Complicating the delicate issue further is the killing of six hostages whose bodies Israeli forces retrieved from Gaza over the weekend, an episode that prompted a public furor in Israel and added more pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a deal. The Israeli military said the hostages were killed by Hamas.

President Biden this week signaled that Mr. Netanyahu was not doing enough to bring the hostages home, but U.S. officials have in public focused blame on Hamas for holding up the negotiations. At the White House on Wednesday, a senior U.S. official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said that the killings of the hostages had not only injected “a sense of urgency” into the talks but also “called into question Hamas’s readiness to do a deal of any kind.”

Hamas leaders have blamed Israel for the impasse and accused Mr. Netanyahu of adding new conditions to previously agreed proposals, and documents reviewed last month by The New York Times bolster that claim.

Mr. Netanyahu has demanded that Israel’s military retain control over Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Hamas has called that demand unacceptable.

The current proposal would include the release of what the U.S. official said were as many as 800 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli detention facilities, in exchange for the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza. More than 60 living hostages are still there, Israeli officials have said, as well as the bodies of 35 who have died, which would also be returned.

Not all the Israeli hostages would be freed immediately, although the U.S. official said that the proposal calls for all women, men over 50 and everyone who is sick or wounded to be among the first to be released.

The official said that “a fraction” of the Palestinian prisoners who would be freed in the initial round of the exchange are among around 500 who are serving life sentences for terrorism charges or other crimes. Although Israel will have some say in deciding which prisoners are freed first, the U.S. official said Hamas had agreed to the arrangement months ago.

Additionally, the U.S. official said, the proposal would allow wounded Hamas militants to leave Gaza for treatment — a condition that the group had demanded.

But in recent weeks, the U.S. official said, Hamas has issued new demands that diverge from earlier agreements, and are “complete non-starters when it comes to the exchange.” The official did not describe the changes.

The six dead hostages recovered over the weekend have compounded the delicate negotiations. Four of the six fell into the category of those who would be released in a first phase. Hamas has threatened to execute more hostages.

In a proposal that calls for releasing an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for each Israeli hostage, “there’s now fewer names on the list,” the U.S. official said.

The U.S. official said the two sides have agreed on most of the other language in the cease-fire proposal.

Hamas has demanded a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as part of a cease-fire deal. But Mr. Netanyahu insists on a continued Israeli military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow stretch of land in southern Gaza along the border with Egypt. How long that presence would last is still unclear.

Mr. Netanyahu has said Israeli forces must stay in the area to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons into Gaza from Egypt. But he pushed back on the idea that the Philadelphi corridor was the chief obstacle, blaming Hamas for intransigence.

“In fact, while we agreed in May and July and in August to a deal, and to an American proposal, Hamas has consistently said no to every one of them,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with “Fox and Friends” that aired on Thursday. “They don’t agree to anything, not to the Philadelphi Corridor, not to the keys of exchanging hostages for jailed terrorists, not to anything, so that’s just a false narrative.”