Israel has agreed to a limited daily pause in fighting in the Gaza Strip starting Sunday so that hundreds of thousands of children can be vaccinated against polio, the United Nations said on Thursday.
According to Rip Peeperkorn, a representative of the World Health Organization (WHO), fighting will cease in three areas of Palestinian territory from morning to afternoon for three consecutive days, citing a commitment from the Israeli authority responsible for Palestinian affairs, COGAT.
“It was agreed that the campaign would be carried out in phases (…) over three days,” Peeperkorn said.
Peeperkorn said the polio vaccination campaign would begin on September 1. “We will start in central Gaza for three days, followed by southern Gaza and then northern Gaza,” he added.
According to the WHO official, a fourth day may be needed for each region.
“We expect all parties to adhere to this,” Peeperkorn said.
“Otherwise it is virtually impossible to run a good campaign because you certainly won’t reach 90%,” he said, referring to the percentage of children the WHO says need to be vaccinated against type 2 poliovirus to prevent a polio outbreak in Gaza.
The daily interruptions in the race to vaccinate more than 600,000 children would begin at 6 a.m. and end at 3 p.m., he added.
After poliovirus was discovered in Gaza’s wastewater, vaccines against the disease were last week brought to the coastal region, currently under siege by Israel, for 1.26 million people.
The United Nations wants to vaccinate about 640,000 children under the age of 10 in the Gaza Strip against the virus in two rounds of vaccinations.
To allow the doses to be administered, UN officials had called for a temporary ceasefire in the war in Gaza, which began nearly 11 months ago.
World Health Organization (WHO) President Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed serious concern about the case of a 10-month-old baby on social media platform X on Friday.
The child from Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip is the first confirmed case of polio in the Gaza Strip in 25 years. The baby showed signs of paralysis in his left leg but was in stable condition.
Since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, many babies in the Gaza Strip have not been vaccinated.
The appalling sanitary conditions in the coastal strip, where many displaced people have to survive in very small spaces and clean water is scarce, could contribute to the rapid spread of the disease.
Polio is an infectious disease that can cause paralysis and death.
Poliovirus is transmitted through fecal and oral contamination. It has been detected in Gaza’s wastewater in recent weeks, although no cases have been confirmed.
Now that health care in the area has collapsed, WHO is concerned the disease could spread undetected.
“We need absolute freedom of movement for health workers and medical equipment to carry out these complex operations safely and effectively,” the WHO Director-General said earlier this month.
According to Peeperkorn, WHO and partner organizations are relying on a combination of vaccination centers and mobile teams to vaccinate people in the Gaza Strip.
Families have access to 392 centres across the region, he said. Nearly 300 mobile teams are also being deployed to bring the vaccine to those in need.
In total, more than 2,100 medical staff will be deployed for this. A second round of vaccinations is normally carried out four weeks after the first.
