Israel-Hamas war latest: UNICEF says polio vaccination campaign in Gaza is surpassing its target

The U.N. children’s agency says a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza reached 189,000 children, surpassing its target and providing a “rare bright spot” in nearly 11 months of war.

UNICEF said Wednesday that more than 500 teams deployed across central Gaza this week, administering the vaccine to children under 10.

It said Israel and Hamas observed limited pauses in the fighting to facilitate the campaign. U.N. agencies now hope to expand the campaign to the harder-hit north and south of the territory. They hope to vaccinate a total of 640,000 children.

The campaign was launched after Gaza had its first reported polio case in 25 years — a 10-month-old boy, now paralyzed in the leg.

Health experts have warned of disease outbreaks in the territory, where the vast majority of people have been displaced, often multiple times, and where hunger is widespread.

Hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into squalid tent camps with few if any public services as Israel continues into offensive, which has killed more than 40,800 people in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 people.

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Israeli drone strike kills 5 men in a car in the West Bank, Palestinian news agency reports

The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported early Thursday that an Israeli drone strike killed five men and wounded another in a car in Tubas in the West Bank.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it carried out “three targeted strikes on armed terrorists that posed a threat on the soldiers,” without immediately elaborating.

For more than a week, hundreds of Israeli forces have been carrying out the deadliest operation in the occupied West Bank since the Israel-Hamas war began.

Israel and Hamas in agreement on 14 of 18 paragraphs in proposal, US official says

Israel and Hamas are in agreement on 14 of the 18 paragraphs in the proposal meant to bridge gaps in cease-fire talks between the two sides, according to a senior Biden administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations. But the official said Israel and Hamas have technical differences about one paragraph and deeper differences about three paragraphs of the proposal.

Those three paragraphs focus on the number of Palestinian prisoners who would be released in exchange for Hamas' Israeli hostages during the first phase of the three-phased cease-fire deal.

Hamas has also raised objections about a continued presence of Israel Defense Forces in the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow 14.5-kilometer-long (9-mile) stretch of land along the coastal enclave’s southern border with Egypt.

Netanyahu has been adamant that Israeli troops remain in the corridor, while Hamas says that position is in breach of the bridging agreement’s call for Israel to leave densely-populated areas of Gaza. The official, however, said there is no direct mention of the Philadelphi corridor in the bridging proposal.

Significant differences remain between the two sides regarding the prisoner-for-hostage exchange in phase one. The list of Palestinian prisoners to be released in the initial phase of the deal includes some who are serving life sentences in Israeli prisons. But the official said that dispute about the ratio of prisoners to hostages to be swapped has been further complicated by last week’s execution of six people taken captive by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

For each hostage, there’s a certain number of Palestinian prisoners that were to be released. Now, “you just have fewer hostages as part of the deal in phase one,” the official said.

The official also expressed frustration with far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition who are staunchly opposing a cease-fire agreement, arguing it would jeopardize Israel’s security in the long term. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir say that the war must continue until Hamas is destroyed and have threatened to topple the government if Netanyahu were to move forward with a cease-fire deal.

The official called the far-right ministers’ position “fundamentally, totally untrue” and argued that “not getting into this deal is more of a threat to Israel’s long-term security than actually concluding the deal.”

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Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

US and Israeli officials discuss tensions at the Israel-Lebanon border

WASHINGTON — White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer held a virtual meeting Wednesday to discuss the ongoing tensions at the Israel-Lebanon border, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly, said that senior White House national security officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein also took part in the discussions about concerns that the tensions with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah could cause the war in Gaza to spread into a regional conflict.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said White House officials on Wednesday continued conversations with Israeli officials in hopes of sealing a cease-fire deal. U.S. officials also spoke with Egyptian and Qatari officials, who have served as intermediaries for Hamas. But Kirby declined to confirm that Sullivan and other senior White House officials spoke with Dermer on Wednesday.