Gaza ministry says 15 killed in Israeli air strike including senior official Mohammad Morsi and family

An Israeli air strike on a house in Jabalia has killed Mohammad Morsi, deputy director of the Gaza Civil Emergency Service in the northern areas of the Gaza Strip, and four of his family, health officials say.

The Civil Emergency Service said in a statement that Morsi’s death raised to 83 the number of its members killed by Israeli fire since October 7.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on Morsi’s death.

Residents said Israeli forces had also blown up several houses in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City 5km from Jabalia.

Medical teams said they were unable to answer desperate calls by some of the residents who had reported being trapped inside their houses, some wounded.

“We hear constant bombing in Zeitoun, we know they are blowing up houses there, we don’t sleep because of the sounds of explosions, the roaring of tanks sound close and the drones don’t stop circling,” said one resident of Gaza City, who lives about 1km away.

“The occupation is wiping out Zeitoun, we are afraid about the people trapped in there,” he told Reuters via a chat app, refusing to be named.

Later on Sunday, the Gaza health ministry said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 15 people.

Three Israelis were shot and killed on Sunday at the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, Israeli officials said, in what appeared to be an attack linked to the Gaza war.

Israel’s military said the gunman approached the Allenby Bridge Crossing from the Jordanian side in a truck and opened fire at Israeli security forces, who killed him in a shootout.

Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said the three Israelis were all men in their 50s and the military said they were civilians.

Relatives identified the gunman as Maher al-Jazi, a retired Jordanian soldier from Athroh, a town in the impoverished area of Maan.

Jordan’s state-run Petra News Agency said he was a truck driver transporting goods to the West Bank.

Residents of central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip reported interruption in internet and communication services, which the Palestinian Telecommunication Company said was because of “the ongoing (Israeli) aggression”.

Palestinians say internet and communication outages, the first in months, affect the ability of medical staffers to dispatch ambulances to bombed areas and make it difficult for people to check on their relatives or report attacks.

Israel and Hamas continued to blame one another for the failure of mediators, including Qatar, Egypt and the United States to broker a ceasefire.

The US is preparing to present a new proposal but the prospects of a breakthrough appear dim as gaps between the sides’ positions remain large.

Meanwhile on Sunday the United Nations, in collaboration with local health authorities, extended by a day a campaign to vaccinate children in the southern Gaza Strip against polio before it moves on Monday to the north.

The campaign aims to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza after its first polio case in about 25 years.

Limited pauses in the fighting have allowed the campaign to proceed.

UN officials said they were making progress, having reached more than half of the children needing the drops in the first two stages in the southern and central Gaza Strip.

A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7 when the Hamas group attacked Israel, killing 1200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court, which Israel denies.

with AP