Middle East Tensions: Israeli Strikes Kill Dozens In Gaza; Tel Aviv Accused Of 'Starvation Campaign' On Palestinians

The polio vaccination drive was announced in Gaza after the first confirmed case of polio was reported in the Palestinian enclave in 25 years -- a 10-month-old boy who now has a paralysed leg.

Meanwhile, witnesses were reported as saying that Israeli troops killed an American woman protesting against settlements in the West Bank on Friday.

Israel's War On Gaza | Latest Developments

Dozens Killed In Israeli Strikes

Medical and local authorities in the Gaza strip said that Israeli air strikes on the region killed over a dozen people overnight into Saturday morning amid the polio vaccination drive there.

As the second phase of vaccination drive was being wrapped up, Israel continued its military offensive against Gaza.

Al-Awda Hospital, in the urban refugee camp of Nuseirat, reported that it received nine dead bodies of people killed in separate aerial strikes. Central Gaza's main hospital Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, meanwhile, said that a woman and her two children were killed in another strike in the nearby refugee camp of Bureij. In the northern Gaza Strip, an airstrike on a school-turned-shelter killed at four people and injured around two dozen others, said Gaza's Civil Defence authority.

Notably, the strikes took place as health officials were wrapping up the second phase of polio vaccinations in Gaza, which recently reportedly its first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

UN World Health Organisation last week began the vaccination drive in central Gaza with an aim to vaccinate 6,40,000 children under the age of 10. The second phase was conducted in the southern part of the strip, following this the health officials will move to the north before concluding the campaign.

Israeli Troops Kill American At West Bank

Israeli soldiers on Friday killed an American woman protesting against settlements in the West Bank. The US government confirmed that a 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi of Seattle was shot in the head.

Eygi was also a Turkish citizen, they said. The White House said that it was "deeply disturbed" by the killing of a US citizen, calling on Israel to investigate what exactly went down.

Meanwhile, Israeli military said that it was looking into reports that forces killed a foreign national while firing at an "instigator of violent activity" in the area of the protest, The Associated Press reported.

The killing came amid a rise in the violence in West Bank since the beginning of Israel's War on Gaza, which began with Hamas's attack on the former on October 7.

Eygi, a volunteer with the activist group International Solidarity Movement, was attending a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion that has been held for years and has often brought Israeli crackdowns and protester stone-throwing.

UN Accuses Israel Of 'Starvation Campaign' In Gaza

The United Nations independent investigator on the right to food, accused Israel of carrying out a "starvation campaign" against Palestinians in its war on Gaza.

Investigator Michael Fakhri, in a report this week, claimed that it began two days after Hamas's surprise attack in southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that these accusations of Israel limiting humanitarian aid were "outrageously false".

"A deliberate starvation policy? You can say anything — it doesn't make it true," he said during a press conference this week.

After immense international pressure, especially from close ally US, Netanyahu's administration gradually opened several border crossings for the controlled deliveries of humanitarian aid.

Fakhri said that limited aid initially went mostly to southern and central Gaza, not to the north where Israel had ordered Palestinians to go.

A University of Oregon School of Law professor, Fakhri was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the investigator or special rapporteur on the right to food. He took on the role in 2020.

"By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 per cent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger," Fakhri said. "Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza."

Fakhri claimed that it goes back 76 years to Israel's independence and its continuous dislocation of Palestinian, accusing Tel Aviv of deploying "the full range of techniques of hunger and starvation against the Palestinians, perfecting the degree of control, suffering and death that it can cause through food systems".

Fakhri said that since the beginning of the war, he has received reports of destruction of the territory's food system, including farmland and fishing, which also has been documented and recognised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and others.

"Israel then used humanitarian aid as a political and military weapon to harm and kill the Palestinian people in Gaza," he claimed.

However, Israel has insisted that it no longer restricts the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, including that of food.