Polio vaccination targets surpassed for Gaza children, WHO says
Noting success of coordinated humanitarian pauses in fighting to enable inoculation, official reports 161,000 kids under 10 treated in first 2 days of campaign in center of Strip
The World Health Organization said that it was ahead of its targets for polio vaccinations in Gaza on Tuesday, day three of a mass campaign, and had inoculated about a quarter of children under 10.
The campaign, which was hastened after the discovery of the first polio case in a Gazan baby last month, relies on daily eight-hour pauses in fighting between Israel and Hamas terrorists in specific areas of the besieged enclave.
Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Palestinian territories, told reporters that it had vaccinated more than 161,000 children under 10 in the center of the Strip in the first two days of its campaign, compared with a projection of around 150,000.
That amounts to about a quarter of the total population targeted in the campaign to stop the spread of the disease, which can cause paralysis and even death in young children.
“Up until now things are going well,” he said. “These humanitarian pauses, up until now they work. We still have 10 days to go.”
Health teams will move on later this week to southern Gaza, where they are aiming to reach some 340,000 children, he said, followed by northern Gaza.
He said that some children in southern Gaza were thought to be outside the agreed zone for the pauses and that negotiations continued in order to reach them.
The WHO says that at least 90 percent of Gazan children need to be vaccinated in order for the campaign to work and to prevent the spread of polio both within Gaza and across borders.
The drive is being staggered across three geographic regions of Gaza, beginning in the central Strip from Sunday until Tuesday, then moving to southern Gaza from Wednesday to Friday, and finally northern Gaza from Saturday to Monday.
Vaccination are being conducted by the WHO together with UNICEF, and in coordination with the IDF’s Southern Command and the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories agency (COGAT).
WHO stated on Friday that Israel had agreed to the humanitarian pauses in the fighting to facilitate the vaccination drive.
“Israel sees the prevention of a polio outbreak in the Gaza Strip as an important mission in the humanitarian effort,” COGAT said.
In July, an unvaccinated 10-month-old from central Gaza contracted polio and suffered partial paralysis, leading to concerns of a wider outbreak.
WHO has said that the presence of a paralysis case indicates there could be hundreds more who have been infected but aren’t showing symptoms.
A Sunday statement by COGAT said that the Israeli agencies “will work to ensure that the population can safely reach the medical centers where the vaccinations will be administered.”
According to COGAT, it and the international agencies involved in the campaign “conducted joint assessments, including the import of vaccines, medical and logistical equipment, refrigeration units for vaccine storage and transportation, the entry of polio-specialized medical teams into the Gaza Strip, [and] marking vaccination areas in the operational systems.”
COGAT said that over one million vaccine doses were brought into Gaza for the campaign over the last month, and that since the war started, enough vaccine had been brought into the Strip for 2.8 million people.
The war erupted on October 7 when Palestinian terror group Hamas led a devastating cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The thousands of terrorists who burst into the south of the country also abducted 251 people as hostages to Gaza.
Israel responded with a military campaign to destroy Hamas, topple its Gaza regime, and free the hostages.
The fighting has devastated large areas of Gaza, gravely deteriorating humanitarian conditions.
