Israel agrees to brief pause in Gaza for polio vaccinations, official says
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Israel has agreed to a temporary pause of some military operations in the Gaza Strip to enable a polio vaccination campaign there, a senior State Department official said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that Israel had not agreed to “pauses in the fighting in order to administer polio vaccines,” but rather “the allocation of certain places in the Gaza Strip” for unstated purposes, an arrangement it said had been approved by the security cabinet. The wording appeared designed to avoid indicating it had approved a humanitarian pause in the fighting in the absence of a cease-fire deal opposed by some members of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Polio vaccines for more than one million people have been delivered to Gaza, Israel’s military said on Sunday after a case of the highly infectious virus was detected there this month.
Aid groups and international organisations called for a pause in fighting to allow for a mass polio vaccination campaign.
Polio was eradicated in Gaza 25 years ago, but vaccine coverage has dropped since the war began last October. The virus was detected in six samples from wastewater in July and the UN said last week that a 10-month-old baby was partially paralysed after contracting polio.
It was not immediately clear how the vaccine would be distributed in Gaza, where ongoing fighting has made humanitarian efforts very difficult.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF) said that a seven-day pause is needed at a minimum to carry out the vaccination campaign.
The UN plans to bring 1.6 million polio vaccine doses to Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are crowded into tent camps lacking clean water or proper disposal of sewage and garbage. Families sometimes use wastewater to drink or clean dishes.
Polio is highly contagious and transmits mainly through contact with contaminated faeces, water or food.
It can cause difficulty breathing and irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. It strikes young children in particular and is sometimes fatal.
The new Israeli statement said that five trucks with special refrigeration equipment for vaccines were brought to Gaza on Friday in coordination with the UN, with the vaccines arriving on Sunday.
The territory’s health care system has been devastated due to the war. Only about a third of Gaza’s 36 hospitals and 40 per cent of its primary healthcare facilities are functioning, according to the UN.
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