The United Nations World Health Organization said Thursday it had reached an agreement with Israel for a limited pause in the war in Gaza to allow polio vaccination for hundreds of thousands of children after the baby contracted the first confirmed case in 25 years in the Palestinian territories.
The vaccination campaign will begin on Sunday, September 1, in central Gaza, with a “humanitarian pause” from 6 am to 3 pm for three days that can be extended by additional days if necessary, said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative in the Palestinian territory.
The effort – which has been coordinated with the Israeli authorities – will then move to southern Gaza and finally northern Gaza to rest, said the UN press conference by video from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the ideal way forward. But it’s the way it works,” Peeperkorn said.
The vaccination campaign targets 640,000 children under the age of 10, who will each receive two drops of the oral polio vaccine in two rounds – the second will be given four weeks after the first.
Peeperkorn said the humanitarian pause was critical so families could get their children vaccinated and return to their homes by 3 p.m.
“We have an agreement on this, so we expect all parties to stick to it,” he said.
WHO says health workers must vaccinate at least 90% of children in Gaza to stop polio transmission. The campaign will involve more than 2,100 health workers from UN agencies and the Gaza Ministry of Health, working in hundreds of sites in Gaza and with mobile teams.
Peace of humanity is not a truce between them Israel and Hamas which the mediators of the US, Egypt and Qatar have long sought, included in the discussion which we are doing this week.
Hamas “is ready to cooperate with international organizations to secure this campaign,” according to a statement from Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau.
Israeli officials said before the plan was announced that there was some sort of tactical pause to allow vaccinations to take place. The official has spoken on condition of anonymity before the plan is finalized.
Israel had no immediate comment Thursday. The Israeli army has previously announced a temporary pause in limited areas to allow international humanitarian operations.
Robert Wood, the US Deputy Ambassador to the UN, urged Israel to avoid ordering more civilian evacuations during the pause and said workers needed security to vaccinate children.
“It is especially important for Israel to facilitate access for agencies to carry out vaccination campaigns and to ensure a period of calm and refrain from military operations during the vaccination campaign period,” he said.
The campaign was launched after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was left partially paralyzed by a vaccine-derived strain of the virus found in the litter, scientists said. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born before October 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory attack on Gaza.
He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who have missed vaccinations because of the war between Israel and Hamas.
The boy’s mother, Neveen Abu El Jidyan, told CBS News Tuesday that she has been able to do very little for her son because of the difficult conditions in the camp for displaced Palestinians where he lives.
“We don’t provide any treatment. We live in tents and there is no medicine,” El Jidyan, 35, told CBS News.
El Jidyan, who has nine other children, was forced to move his family from northern Gaza to a camp in Deir el-Balah because of the fighting.
Abdul Rahman had developed normally and was almost walking, El Jidyan said, when he started vomiting and had a fever.
“I took her to the hospital and they told me there was nothing they could do. They knew her condition, but there was no treatment,” she told CBS News. “When the virus hit him, he changed overnight.”
El Jidyan said he believed the unhealthy conditions his family was forced into caused his son’s illness.
“Our living conditions – we don’t have clean water, clean food. We live in tents and there is nothing clean here,” he said.
Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decades-long effort by the WHO and its partners to eradicate the disease. Health care workers in Gaza have been warning of a potential polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis unleashed by the Israeli offensive escalates.
Displaced Palestinians often live in overcrowded camps, near piles of garbage and dirty water flowing into streets that workers describe as a breeding ground for diseases such as polio, spread through feces.
The strain of polio the 10-month-old contracted developed from a weakened virus that was originally part of the oral vaccine but was removed from the vaccine in 2016 in hopes of preventing vaccine-derived outbreaks. Public health authorities are aware that the decision will leave people unprotected from the strain, with scientists saying the cases are the result of an “inappropriate failure” of public health policy.
