Dozens of Palestinians killed in latest Israeli strikes on Gaza Strip and West Bank

Israeli strikes on Palestinian territories have killed more than two dozen people, according to local officials.
They say an Israeli air strike killed five Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and at least 20 people, including 16 women and children, were killed in the Gaza Strip.
Gaza’s health ministry said Tuesday’s strike on a tent camp in an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone killed at least 19 people.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees said on Wednesday nearly 530,000 children had now received the polio vaccine across the strip. Unrwa said its vaccination campaign was ongoing in north Gaza.
Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 41,084 Palestinians and wounded 95,029 since October 7th, the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry said on Wednesday. The ministry does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count.
The war has caused vast destruction and displaced around 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, often multiple times.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in their October 7th attack that sparked the war. They abducted another 250 and are still holding around 100. Around a third of them are believed to be dead.
Elsewhere, the Israeli military said two Israeli soldiers died and seven more were injured when their helicopter crashed in the southern Gaza Strip.
The military said the overnight helicopter crash was not the result of enemy fire and is under investigation.
The helicopter was on a mission to evacuate wounded soldiers from Gaza for treatment in Israeli hospitals.
There have been 340 Israeli soldiers killed since the ground operation began in Gaza in late October, at least 50 of whom have been killed in accidents within Gaza – not as a result of combat with Palestinian militants, according to the military.
[ ICC prosecutor again urges arrest warrants for Binyamin Netanyahu and Hamas chief Yahya SinwarOpens in new window ]
Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden says he is “outraged and deeply saddened” by the death of an American activist who was shot by Israeli forces while protesting against settlements in the occupied West Bank, calling it “totally unacceptable”.
“There must be full accountability,” Mr Biden said in a statement released early on Wednesday. “And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old activist from Seattle who also had Turkish citizenship, was likely shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by its soldiers, and that it had launched a criminal investigation.
That drew a strong rebuke from her family members, who said in a statement that they were “deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional”. – AP/Reuters