At least eight people have been killed and dozens wounded in Israeli attacks across Gaza, according to health authorities, as Israel ordered some residents in northern Gaza to evacuate their homes.
Health officials said two Israeli air strikes on Monday had killed seven people in central Gaza and another strike killed one man in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
The armed wings of the Palestinian groups Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said they fought against Israeli forces in several areas across the Gaza Strip with antitank rockets and mortar fire.
The Israeli military said its forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure and killed dozens of Palestinian fighters in recent days, including senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Monday that at least 40,988 Palestinians have been killed and 94,825 wounded in Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave since October last year. In the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 1,139 people were killed.
Earlier, the Israeli military ordered Palestinians in a neighbourhood in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya to evacuate after it said rockets were launched from the area at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Sunday night.
The military’s spokesperson released a map marking the area, adding that “the specified area has been warned many times in the past” and it is now “considered a dangerous combat zone”.
The Israeli military had earlier said one of the rockets was intercepted and another fell into the sea.
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee more than 10 times.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said people in the northern Strip said they have been getting new evacuation orders but they have no other places to go to and they are just moving between neighbourhoods.
Polio vaccine campaign
Amid the latest evacuation orders, the United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to go to medical facilities to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio.
Limited pauses in fighting have been held to allow the rollout of the vaccination campaign, which aims to reach 640,000 children in Gaza after the territory’s first polio case in about 25 years.
UN officials said the campaign in the southern and central Gaza Strip had so far reached more than half of the children there needing the drops. A second round of vaccinations will be required four weeks after the first.
Juliette Touma with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees told the Reuters news agency on Monday that 450,000 of the children targeted in the campaign had been vaccinated.
“Tuesday is the hardest part when we roll out the campaign in the north. Hopefully, that will work so we complete the first stage of the campaign. The second and final stage is planned for the end of the month when we have to do all of this all over again,” Touma said.
Sombre new school year
Meanwhile, on Monday the new school year in the Palestinian territory also officially began. But more than 630,000 students could not attend school because all Gaza educational institutions remain shut.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education said 90 percent of schools in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged in Israel’s assault on the territory.
“The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation, including child marriage, child labour and recruitment into armed groups,” Touma said.
Hamas said in a statement that the denial of 630,000 students of their right to education is a “deliberate violation to all rights stipulated by international laws, which leaves the international community and UN agencies responsible to put an end to these crimes”.
