Polio vaccinations begin in northern Gaza despite operational challenges
Health and aid officials say access restrictions, evacuation orders, fuel shortages hampering operation to vaccinate some 200,000 children
A campaign to vaccinate a final 200,000 children in northern Gaza against polio began on Tuesday although health and aid officials said the operation was complicated by access restrictions, evacuation orders and shortages of fuel.
The campaign in northern Gaza, the part of the territory hardest hit by Israel’s 11-month military offensive against Hamas terrorists, follows the vaccination of more than 446,000 Palestinian children in central and south Gaza earlier this month.
Medical staff had started administering vaccines in the north despite a dire lack of fuel, among other challenges, said Dr. Moussa Abed of the primary care unit in Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Vaccination centers are in areas that are militarily very active, difficult to reach and isolated if things go wrong, said Sam Rose, a deputy director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
“There are some nerves, but we’ll have to make it work,” he told Reuters by text message.
On Monday, Israel stopped a convoy that included vehicles and fuel for the vaccination campaign as well as a World Health Organization team trying to get to Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital and the mission had to be aborted, the WHO’s Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in a briefing.
The IDF said it had stopped the convoy after receiving intelligence that several unauthorized Palestinians had snuck into the convoy and that troops had halted the convoy to question the suspects.
The IDF added that the convoy was not transporting polio vaccines, as some reports claimed, but rather was for UN workers switching personnel in the area.
‘Extremely difficult’
Israel also issued an evacuation order in north Gaza, the first in more than two weeks, that included areas that are part of humanitarian pause zones agreed upon for the polio vaccinations, the UN noted on Monday.
However, the IDF said the area was an “active combat zone” after the evacuation order was given in response to Hamas firing two rockets from the area to Ashkelon. It added that residents in the area had received repeated warnings.
“The centralization of services in the south makes it extremely difficult for us to get fuel, to get access to vaccinations, and to all other logistics,” Mahmoud Shalabi of Medical Aid for Palestinians, a UK-based charity, told Reuters via a spokesperson.
“There is still no fuel for the movement of vehicles for vaccination teams in the north.”
The campaign to vaccinate some 640,000 children in Gaza began on September 1, following confirmation by the WHO last month that a baby had been partially paralyzed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
The campaign in north Gaza aims to conclude a first vaccination round, with a second set to commence after a month.
Israel began its military campaign in Gaza after the Hamas terror group led a shock incursion into southern Israel on the October 7, killing some1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 251 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 40,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
