Israeli forces have killed 33 Palestinians across Gaza in the past 24 hours as they battled Hamas-led militants, Palestinian officials have said, but brief pauses in fighting allowed medics to conduct a third day of polio vaccinations for children.
Among those killed were four women in the southern city of Rafah and eight people near a hospital in Gaza City in the north, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said.
Others were killed in separate air strikes across the territory, it said.
The Israeli military said it killed eight Palestinian gunmen, including a senior Hamas commander who took part in the 7 October attacks in Israel, at a command centre near the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
A statement said Ahmed Fozi Nazer Muhammad Wadia had taken command of a "massacre of civilians carried out by Hamas terrorists" in Israel's Netiv HaAsara community near the Gaza border.
There was no response from Hamas.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they were battling Israeli forces in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City, and also in Rafah and Khan Younis in the south.
Nevertheless, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was ahead of its targets for polio vaccinations in Gaza today, day three of a mass campaign, and had inoculated about a quarter of children under 10.
The campaign, which was hastened by the discovery of the first polio case in a Gazan baby last month, relies on daily eight-hour pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in specific areas of the besieged enclave.
Diplomatic efforts to secure a permanent ceasefire and release foreign and Israeli hostages held in Gaza and return many Palestinians jailed by Israel have stalled, however.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israeli troops would remain in the Philadelphi corridor on the southern edge of Gaza, one of the main sticking points in reaching a deal to end the fighting and return hostages.
Hamas, which wants an agreement to end the war and see Israeli forces out of all of the Gaza Strip, says such a condition, among some others, would prevent a deal. Netanyahu says war can only end when Hamas is eradicated.
The United Nations, in collaboration with the local health authorities, embarked on the third day of a complex campaign to vaccinate around 640,000 children in Gaza.
Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters that it had vaccinated over 161,000 children under 10 in the central area in the first two days of its campaign versus a projected 150,000.
"Up until now things are going well," he said. "These humanitarian pauses, up until now they work. We still have ten days to go."
Health teams will move on to southern Gaza later this week,where they are aiming to reach some 340,000 children, he said, followed by northern Gaza.
He said that some children in southern Gaza were thought to be outside the agreed zone for the pauses and that negotiations continued in order to reach them.
The WHO says that at least 90% of Gazan children need to be vaccinated in order for the campaign to work and to prevent the spread of polio both within Gaza and across borders.
With Gaza lying in ruins and the majority of the 2.4 million residents forced to flee, often taking refuge in cramped and unsanitary conditions, disease has spread.
After the first confirmed polio case in 25 years, a vaccination drive got under way on Sunday with localised "humanitarian pauses" to the fighting.
UN wants independent probe after Israeli hostages executed
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called Tuesday for an independent investigation into reports that Palestinian armed groups summarily executed six Israeli hostages.
Israel's military said the six were all captured alive during Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war, and were shot dead shortly before troops found them.
The military announced Sunday it had recovered the bodies from a tunnel in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they were "executed" with a bullet "to the head".
"We are horrified by reports that Palestinian armed groups summarily executed six Israeli hostages, which would constitute a war crime," the UN Human Rights Office said on X.
It added that Turk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, "calls for independent, impartial and transparent investigation and for perpetrators to be held to account".
The US, meanwhile, said that the death of the six hostages over the weekend underscores the urgency to get a ceasefire deal in Gaza and the release of the remaining captives.
"Clearly what happened over the weekend underscores how important it is to get this done as quickly as possible," White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a briefing, adding that Hamas was responsible for their deaths.
