As the United Nations prepared to launch a polio vaccination campaign in the Gaza Strip On Tuesday, a UN humanitarian aid worker said the Israeli military’s multiple evacuation orders “have completely disrupted the humanitarian response on the ground.”
“If the humanitarians have to move themselves, they can’t work. Operations have to be shut down while they move,” Louise Wateridge told CBS News affiliate BBC News.
She said UNRWA, the UN agency operating in the Palestinian territories and the largest provider of primary health care in the Gaza Strip, had been ordered to evacuate its facilities at least 15 times so far in August – which amounts to about once every two days.
“There are health centers, there are schools where people are sheltering, there are headquarters, there are distribution centers. All these buildings that we’re working out of, we’re having to pull everything out, move personnel, move support, move all the ongoing operations, patients and so on,” Wateridge said. “Lives are being lost, people are not getting support. It’s just a complete disaster for us to do our work on the ground.”
The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday that troops “continued to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, eliminate terrorists and locate underground terrorist infrastructure and weapons” during operations in central Gaza. The IDF has long accused Hamas of storing weapons and militants, even having command centers, in schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s population has been forced to relocate to a shrinking humanitarian zone designated by the Israeli military. The latest Israeli evacuation orders have reduced that coastal area to about 11% of the size of the Gaza Strip, according to the UN.
Several hundred thousand people who were already displaced have recently been ordered to resettle in the area, “and this is not really 11% of the land that is fit for habitation, fit for services, fit for life,” Sam Rose, UNRWA’s senior deputy field director, told reporters on Monday. He added that polio has re-emerged in the cramped conditions “with a small number of cases that could spread very quickly.”
Polio is a disease that mainly affects young children and can lead to lifelong paralysis. The first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years was confirmed last week in a 10-month-old child, according to UNICEFthe UN children’s agency. The child was reportedly left paralyzed in one leg and is in stable condition.
A UN campaign to vaccinate about 95% of Gaza’s children under the age of 10 is set to begin on Saturday, a UN official said on Monday, after the first batch of vaccines arrived in the enclave.
“We’re about to do the impossible and launch this polio vaccination campaign under these circumstances,” Wateridge told the BBC. “But it’s just almost impossible in these circumstances with these bombings, with these strikes, with these ongoing displacement orders to try to reach these children and provide the health care that they need.”
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas and other militants who launched an attack on Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking about 250 others hostage to Gaza. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which makes no distinction between fighters and civilians. It has created a large-scale humanitarian crisis and forced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to flee their homes.
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