By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO (Reuters) – An Israeli air strike on a house in Jabalia killed Mohammad Morsi, deputy head of Gaza’s Civil Emergency Service for the northern areas of the Gaza Strip, and four members of his family on Sunday, health officials said.
The Civil Emergency Service said in a statement that Morsi’s death brought to 83 the number of its members killed by Israeli fire since Oct. 7.
There was no immediate Israeli comment on Morsi’s death.
Residents said Israeli forces had also blown up several houses in the Gaza City suburb of Zeitoun, 5km from Jabalia. Medical teams said they were unable to respond to desperate calls from some of the residents who had reported that they were trapped inside their homes and some were injured.
“We hear constant shelling in Zeitoun, we know that houses are being blown up there, we are not sleeping because of the sound of explosions, the roar of tanks can be heard nearby and drones keep circling,” said a resident of Gaza City, who lives about a kilometer away.
“The occupation is destroying Zeitoun, we are afraid for the people trapped there,” he told Reuters via a chat app, declining to be identified.
Israel and Hamas continued to blame each other for the failure of mediators, including Qatar, Egypt and the United States, to negotiate a ceasefire. The United States is preparing to present a new proposal, but prospects for a breakthrough appear slim as differences between the sides’ positions remain wide.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, the United Nations, in collaboration with local health authorities, extended the campaign to vaccinate children in the southern Gaza Strip against polio by one day before moving to the north on Monday.
The campaign aims to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza, following the first case of polio in some 25 years. Limited breaks in fighting have allowed the campaign to continue.
UN officials said they were making progress, having reached more than half of the children who needed the vaccines in the first two phases in the south and central Gaza Strip. A second round of vaccinations will be needed four weeks after the first.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict erupted on Oct. 7 when the Hamas group attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli counts.
Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million people, causing a hunger crisis and leading to accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which Israel denies.
The Palestinian Health Ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in its casualty reports, but health officials say most of the fatalities have been civilians.
Israel, which has lost 340 soldiers in Gaza, says at least a third of the Palestinian dead are combatants.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; editing by Jan Harvey)