UN conducts polio vaccination campaign in Gaza during lull in fighting

GAZA – The United Nations will begin vaccinating some 640,000 children in designated areas of the Gaza Strip on Sunday in a campaign that relies on eight-hour daily pauses in fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants.

The complex campaign targeting children under 10 comes after confirmation last week that a child had been paralysed by poliovirus type 2, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.

The World Health Organization says it needs to vaccinate at least 90 percent of children in Gaza twice, with a four-week gap between doses, for the campaign to succeed, but it notes enormous challenges in the Palestinian enclave, which has been devastated by nearly 11 months of war.

“The situation is not ideal,” Rick Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization’s representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva on Friday.

“We believe that implementation is possible if the process goes properly,” he added.

The organization said that the campaign will be carried out in three stages in the central, southern and northern Gaza Strip.

The fighting will stop for at least eight hours on three consecutive days in each phase. The pauses may be extended for a fourth day in each phase, which the World Health Organization has said is likely to be necessary.

This means that each round of vaccinations may take less than two weeks.

But a map seen by Reuters on Friday showed the pauses did not appear to cover every area in its entirety. A U.N. source said the map was issued by the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories unit, which coordinates with the Palestinians. The map appeared to show the pauses would occur in a smaller area within each area.

The Israeli Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories unit referred questions about the map to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The planned pauses are not part of months-long ceasefire negotiations aimed at reaching a truce in Gaza and recovering Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

“The most important thing now is to provide the security and access necessary to implement the campaign effectively,” Joyce Msuya, acting head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on Thursday. “I don’t need to tell you how catastrophic it could be if we cannot contain this preventable disease, which is a disease that knows no borders.”

Reuters