Source: THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

The U.S. Sec­re­tary of State said Thurs­day that the Unit­ed States will con­tin­ue to press Is­rael to do more to spare hu­man­i­tar­i­an sites in the Gaza Strip, a day af­ter an Is­raeli airstrike on a U.N. school com­plex, shel­ter­ing dis­placed Pales­tini­ans, killed 14 peo­ple there, in­clud­ing six U.N. staffers.

The deaths at the U.N. school on Wednes­day came amid a spate of Is­raeli airstrikes across Gaza that killed at least 34 Pales­tini­ans, ac­cord­ing to lo­cal of­fi­cials. Among those killed were 19 women and chil­dren, they said.

When asked on Thurs­day at a news con­fer­ence in the Pol­ish cap­i­tal about Is­rael’s bomb­ing of the school com­plex in cen­tral Gaza the day be­fore, Blinken told re­porters that “we need to see hu­man­i­tar­i­an sites pro­tect­ed.”

“That’s some­thing we con­tin­ue to raise with Is­rael,” he said.

Wednes­day’s strike on the U.N.-sup­port­ed al-Jaouni Prepara­to­ry Boys School in Nu­seirat refugee camp, in cen­tral Gaza, killed at least 14 peo­ple, in­clud­ing two chil­dren and a woman, hos­pi­tal of­fi­cials said. Among those killed were six staffers from the U.N. Pales­tin­ian refugee agency, known as UN­R­WA, the main U.N. re­lief agency in Gaza.

UN­R­WA de­scribed the strike as the dead­liest sin­gle in­ci­dent for its staff mem­bers. Among those killed at the school, it said, were the man­ag­er of the shel­ter and oth­ers work­ing to help the thou­sands of dis­placed peo­ple tak­ing refuge there, in­clud­ing teach­ers.

The head of UN­R­WA, Philippe Laz­zari­ni, said at least 220 UN­R­WA staffers have been killed in Gaza since Is­rael’s mil­i­tary of­fen­sive be­gan in re­sponse to Hamas’ dead­ly Oct. 7 at­tack on Is­rael.

The Is­raeli mil­i­tary said it was tar­get­ing Hamas mil­i­tants plan­ning at­tacks from in­side the school.

Blinken blamed Hamas for con­tin­u­ing to hide its fight­ers among civil­ians and said the bomb­ing “un­der­scores the ur­gency” of reach­ing a cease-fire in the em­bat­tled ter­ri­to­ry.

Hamas-led mil­i­tants killed some 1,200 peo­ple, most­ly civil­ians, in their Oct. 7 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.

The Health Min­istry says more than 41,000 Pales­tini­ans have been killed in Gaza since the Is­rael-Hamas war be­gan. It does not dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween fight­ers and civil­ians in its count. The war has caused vast de­struc­tion and dis­placed about 90% of Gaza’s pop­u­la­tion of 2.3 mil­lion, of­ten mul­ti­ple times.

Med­ical teams in Gaza wrap up their fi­nal day of a po­lio vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign

DEIR AL-BAL­AH, Gaza Strip — The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion says med­ical teams in Gaza are wrap­ping up the fi­nal day of an emer­gency po­lio vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of the ter­ri­to­ry’s first-known case of the ill­ness in more than 25 years.

Dr. Rik Peep­erko­rn, the U.N. health agency’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive, told re­porters in a news con­fer­ence from Gaza that the health work­ers had reached more than an es­ti­mat­ed 552,000 chil­dren un­der the age of 5. They used a new oral po­lio vac­cine tar­get­ing the spe­cif­ic type of po­lio seen in Gaza, which is a mu­tat­ed strain that orig­i­nat­ed in an old­er oral vac­cine.

Peep­erko­rn said WHO and its part­ners have yet to do a fi­nal analy­sis of how many chil­dren were ac­tu­al­ly cov­ered, but added that it was more than ex­pect­ed. On Wednes­day, Pales­tin­ian health of­fi­cials said more than half a mil­lion Gaza chil­dren have been vac­ci­nat­ed.

“We are quite con­fi­dent that we reached an enor­mous [num­ber] of chil­dren in this short time,” Peep­erko­rn said, re­fer­ring to the four-day vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign. He said au­thor­i­ties were aim­ing to cov­er more than 90% of chil­dren in this im­mu­niza­tion round and in the sec­ond one, to be held next month.