(United Nations) Israeli authorities have agreed to a series of three-day “humanitarian pauses” in central, southern and northern Gaza to allow for the start of a campaign to vaccinate children against polio on Sunday, a World Health Organization official said Thursday.
“What we discussed and what was accepted is that the campaign will start on the 1ster September, in central Gaza, for three days, and there will be a “humanitarian pause” for several hours each day, Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative in Gaza, said during a video press conference, specifying that the same system is then planned for the south and north of the territory for the first of two waves of vaccination.
Due in part to damaged roads and displaced populations, the UN may need an extra day for each area, and the agreement provides for the humanitarian pause – scheduled each day between early morning and early afternoon – to be extended, he said.
“There is an agreement, and we hope that all parties will respect it. Otherwise, it will be impossible to carry out a real campaign” of vaccination, he insisted.
Contacted by AFP, Israeli authorities did not immediately comment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had indicated on the night of Wednesday to Thursday that it was not a “ceasefire to vaccinate against polio but the provision of certain places” in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian movement Hamas has indicated that it “supports” a “humanitarian truce”.
After 25 years of absence in the Palestinian territory, the first case of polio was recently confirmed in Gaza in a ten-month-old baby in Deir al-Balah, after the detection of the poliovirus in sewage samples collected in late June in Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah.
The UN had called for seven-day humanitarian pauses for each of the two waves of vaccination to administer the oral vaccine to 640,000 children under 10.
The second dose of the vaccine should be administered within four weeks, the WHO official said.
A widespread threat just forty years ago, poliomyelitis – which can cause irreversible paralysis in just a few hours – has largely disappeared from the world thanks to vaccines.