Israeli strike kills senior rescue service official in Gaza as fighting rages

An Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia yesterday 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 said.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 Oct first week last year.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 5 km 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 around 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 yesterday, the Gaza health ministry said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 15 people.Residents of central and southern Gaza areas 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, impact 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, 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 yesterday the UN, 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 today to the north. The campaign aims to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza after its first polio case in around 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 in the first week of October when the Hamas group stormed Israel. 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 2.3mn, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court, which Israel denies.The Palestinian health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in its casualty reports, but health officials say that most of the fatalities have been civilians.