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In the Gaza Strip, where war has been raging for nearly eleven months, Israel continued its deadly offensive on Saturday, August 31, in response to the bloody attack carried out by the Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023.
The war resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to a count by Agence France-Presse (AFP) based on official data. Of the 251 people kidnapped that day, 103 are still being held in Gaza, including 33 declared dead by the army.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, along with the United States and the European Union. The army launched a major offensive in the Gaza Strip in response, killing at least 40,691 people, according to the Hamas government’s health ministry, whose toll is unverifiable.
A large “anti-terrorist” operation in the West Bank
The Israeli army announced on Saturday the death of one of its soldiers, on the fourth day of its operation in the West Bank, where fighting is now concentrated in the Jenin refugee camp, a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups. Another soldier was “seriously injured” during the same ” operation “, she added without giving further details. In the morning, the armed wing of Hamas had announced the death of one of its fighters during “close combat” in the camp.
In Jenin, in the West Bank, the sound of fighting echoes in the deserted streets, where only Israeli tanks circulate. An Israeli drone and two military helicopters flew over the city in the morning. The Israeli army also announced that it had “eliminated”, On the night of Friday to Saturday, two Palestinians who were preparing to carry out explosive attacks near colonies in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
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According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least twenty-two Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army since Wednesday, mostly fighters, during operations launched simultaneously in three cities in the north of this occupied territory. The Israeli army claims, for its part, to have killed “twenty terrorists”Among those killed was an 82-year-old man, according to the Palestinian agency WAFa, and two teenagers aged 13 and 17, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which also reported fifty-five injured since Wednesday.
Hamas, which has been in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, and Islamic Jihad have announced that at least 13 of those killed were fighters from their armed branches. Like other Palestinian groups, they claim to be resisting Israeli troops in the West Bank. Israeli incursions into the Palestinian autonomous zone are a daily occurrence in the West Bank, where deadly violence has been on the rise since the start of the war, but are rarely on this scale.
Israeli strike on refugee camp in Gaza Strip
The Gaza Strip Civil Defense reported 42 deaths Saturday in Israeli strikes on the Palestinian enclave. Nine adults from the same family died in an Israeli strike Saturday on a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp (center), Marwan Abu Nassar, a doctor at Al-Awda hospital, told AFP.
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The night before, an Israeli strike targeted the Jabaliya refugee camp (north), according to the civil defense. Using torches or mobile phones, rescuers searched for possible missing people in the rubble shrouded in clouds of dust, according to images from AFP-TV.
In Gaza City (north), the Hamas health ministry announced “dead and injured among patients and their relatives” after “Al-Ahly hospital complex was targeted on Saturday evening”. This is a “Israeli bombing of nearby terrain” from the hospital, a hospital source said. In Khan Younis (south), the Palestinian Red Crescent reported five deaths following the bombing of a house.
Israeli army locates hostage remains in Gaza Strip, Haaretz reports
The Israeli army announced on Saturday that it had located a number of bodies during the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Its soldiers are currently working to extract and identify them, a process that will take several hours. It did not confirm that they were hostages held in Gaza and urged not to speculate on their identities, but, according to several media outlets, including the daily Haaretz, These are believed to be people abducted during the attack on October 7.
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Polio vaccination campaign begins in central Gaza Strip
The anti-polio campaign began on Saturday in the central Gaza Strip, on the eve of a “humanitarian pause” announced by the United Nations (UN) to allow children to be vaccinated despite the war that has been ravaging the Palestinian territory for almost eleven months.
“Teams from the Ministry of Health, UNRWA and NGOs have started the polio vaccination campaign in the central Gaza Strip”said Dr. Moussa Abed, director of primary care in the Hamas government’s health ministry. The UN has sent 1.2 million vaccines in the form of drops to be swallowed.
The first case of polio was recently confirmed in a ten-month-old child in the Gaza Strip, where the disease was eradicated twenty-five years ago. On Thursday, the World Health Organization announced that Israeli authorities had agreed to a series of “humanitarian pauses” three days each in the centre, south and north of the Gaza Strip to enable the launch of the vaccination of 640,000 children against polio on Sunday.
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