Unvaccinated 17-year-old from Jerusalem area contracts polio, condition unspecified
Rare infection comes after mass vaccination campaign in wartorn Gaza, where polio was detected over the summer; Israel has seen a handful of cases in last decade

An unvaccinated 17-year-old in the Jerusalem area has contracted polio, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday. No details were given on the teen’s condition.
The case comes following a major polio vaccination campaign in the war-torn Gaza Strip, after a case of the virus was detected in the enclave for the first time in some 25 years this past July, amid ongoing fighting between Israel and the Hamas terror group.
Cases of polio in Israel are highly rare, but not unheard of, and occur almost entirely among children in unvaccinated populations.
In May 2023, an unvaccinated 8-year-old in Safed caught the virus; three other children contracted the virus from that child, but showed no clinical symptoms. In 2022, an unvaccinated 4-year-old was hospitalized with paralysis from the virus, prompting a vaccination campaign in Jerusalem.
Those sporadic cases came about a decade after polio was detected in the sewer system in southern Israel in 2013, prompting a major vaccination campaign which appears to have prevented any infections.
In its statement on Wednesday, the Health Ministry noted that “polio is a virus that causes childhood paralysis, which has been eradicated from many countries around the world thanks to effective and safe vaccines that have been around for decades.”
“No child in the State of Israel should suffer from polio in 2024. A vaccinated child is a protected child,” the ministry said.
According to the Walla news site, some 12 percent of under-18s in Jerusalem are not vaccinated for polio. According the Health Ministry, the rate of under-18s who are not vaccinated for polio in the entire country stands at about 5%.