DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli airstrikes killed at least 15 people, including women and children, overnight in Loopaccording to hospital officials and a body count by an Associated Press journalist on Sunday.
The latest attacks came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to leave on Monday for the United States, where he is expected to meet with President Joe Biden and address Congress to make his case for it. the nine month war against Hamas as ceasefire negotiations continue.
The already precarious humanitarian conditions inside besieged Gaza have worsened with the discovery of polio virus and water and sanitation services have suffered for the territory’s population of 2.3 million, most of them displaced. Traces of the virus were found in wastewater samples in Gaza. The World Health Organization has said that no one has been treated for symptoms caused by the infection.
Israel’s military said soldiers would be vaccinated and that it would work with organizations to bring vaccines to Palestinians.
Israel’s latest airstrikes hit the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, where nine people were killed, including two children, and the southern city of Khan Younis, where at least six people were killed, including two. girls. Men and women cried and hugged the small bodies wrapped in white shrouds.
On one of them was written “Unknown body of a five-month-old baby.”
Smoke also rose from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, but there was no immediate information on casualties.
The war in Gaza has killed more than 38,900 people, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count. The war began with a Hamas militants attack in southern Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. About 120 people are still being held and about a third of them are believed to be dead, according to Israeli authorities.
Netanyahu has vowed to eliminate Hamas’s military and governance capabilities and secure the return of the remaining hostages. The hostages’ families and thousands of other Israelis have demonstrated weekly urging the prime minister to reach a deal. ceasefire agreement that would bring your loved ones home.
Mediators Egypt, Qatar and the United States continue to press Israel and Hamas toward a gradual agreement that would stop the fighting and free the hostages.
Concerns about a broader regional conflict continue. Israel attacked the port of Hodeida in Yemen on Saturday in the first known Israeli attacks there since the war in Gaza began. The strikes, in response to a deadly Houthi drone attack in Tel Aviv, threatened to open a new front as Israel battles Iranian proxies in the region, including Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
On Sunday, the Israeli army said so intercepted a missile launched from Yemen while the Houthis promised “shocking attacks.”
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