GAZA: Fighting raged on unabated in the besieged Gaza Strip, with the territory’s civil defense agency saying on Tuesday that a Zionist operation in and around the second city of Khan Yunis killed about 300 people since it began last week. “Since the beginning of the (Zionist) ground invasion of the eastern part of Khan Yunis province, the civil defense and medical teams have recovered approximately 300 bodies of martyrs, many of them decomposed,” agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.

The Zionist military launched the assault on July 22 to halt rocket fire from the area, which already saw heavy fighting earlier this year. Last week, it said troops had retrieved the bodies of five Zionists from the area.

They had been killed during the Hamas attacks of October 7 and their bodies taken back to Gaza, the military said. The Zionist military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,400 people, according to the health ministry, mostly women and children.

The health ministry in Gaza also declared the Palestinian territory a “polio epidemic area”, accusing Zionist military campaign of destroying health infrastructure, which led to the recurrence of the virus. The CPV2 strain of the virus has been detected in sewage samples collected from the southern Khan Yunis area and central governorates, the ministry said.

It did not say if any human cases had been detected, but said the presence of the virus “constitutes a health threat to the residents of the Gaza Strip and neighboring countries and a setback to the global polio eradication program”. The wild version of the virus is now endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but a type of vaccine that contains small amounts of weakened but live polio still causes occasional outbreaks elsewhere.

United Nations agencies said recently that such vaccine-derived type-2 poliovirus had been detected in samples collected from sewage. “The brutal (Zionist) aggression that deprived the people of usable water, the destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, the accumulation of tons of garbage and a lack of food security” had led to the recurrence of the virus, the ministry said.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said it was “looking at a very problematic situation”. “Having vaccine-derived poliovirus in the sewage very likely means that it’s out there somewhere in people,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told journalists. “But again, about 75 percent of people infected by polio don’t even show any symptoms. That means it most likely is in the population but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we see an outbreak of cases.”

He said a campaign to distribute vaccines across the Gaza Strip was needed. “It’s not enough just to get it (the vaccine) into Ben Gurion airport and then hopefully get it into Gaza. It needs to reach people,” Lindmeier said. Zionist bombardments and ground assault have devastated swathes of Gaza, displacing the vast majority of its 2.4 million population.

Meanwhile, the Zionist entity and Hezbollah exchanged deadly fire on Tuesday, following a rocket attack from Lebanon on the Golan Heights that killed 12 children over the weekend and sent regional tensions soaring. The strike on the Druze Arab town of Majdal Shams in the Zionist-annexed Golan Heights on Saturday, whose victims were aged between 10 and 16, was blamed by the Zionist entity and the United States on Lebanon’s Hezbollah, but the group has denied any connection to the attack.

Zionist medics on Tuesday said one civilian, a 30-year-old man, was killed following a rocket attack on the northern kibbutz of HaGoshrim. The Zionist army meanwhile reported its forces were “striking the sources of fire”, which were in Lebanon. It had said earlier that it struck around 10 Hezbollah targets overnight in seven different areas of south Lebanon, killing one fighter from the Iran-backed group.

Hezbollah said on Tuesday that it had fired a salvo of Katyusha rockets at a military headquarters in the village of Beit Hillel, in response to “the (Zionist) enemy’s attack on the town of Jibchit, which resulted in civilian casualties”. Lebanon’s official National News Agency had reported a strike in the Jibchit area that caused “major damage”.

Lebanon has been bracing for major retaliatory strikes following the Golan attack, amid international efforts to defuse tensions. But Druze residents of the town — the vast majority of whom have rejected Zionist citizenship and identify as Syrians — have rejected threats of retaliation for the deadly strike. A paramedic from Majdal Shams, Nabih Abu Saleh, told AFP his community was “against any (Zionist) response”, and asked: “Who will we strike? Our people in Syria and Lebanon?” – Agencies