The anti-polio campaign was officially launched on Sunday in the centre of the Gaza Strip, where the UN has announced “humanitarian pauses”, the head of three vaccination centres for children in the area told AFP.
“There is a significant drone flight over the center of the Gaza Strip and we hope that this vaccination campaign for children will take place calmly,” added Dr. Yasser Chaabane, medical director of al-Awda hospital.
“Vaccinations started at 9 a.m. [2 h heure de l’Est]”We have opened the centres and we are receiving children aged from one day to ten years old, and things have been calm so far,” he continued.
The Health Ministry in Gaza and UN agencies have listed 67 vaccination centres in hospitals, clinics and schools for the centre of the small Palestinian territory. In the south, 59 centres are planned and 33 in the largely depopulated north. In these two areas, vaccinations will take place in a second and then a third phase.
The campaign, announced by Israel and the government of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza, aims to vaccinate more than 640,000 children under the age of ten in the besieged Palestinian territory devastated by nearly 11 months of war.
PHOTO EYAD BABA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Health workers carry containers filled with polio vaccines during a campaign in Zawayda, central Gaza Strip, on 1er September 2024.
Polio, eradicated in Gaza for 25 years, has reappeared in the midst of these hostilities launched on October 7 by the deadly attack by Hamas in Israel.
Already on Saturday, polio vaccines were administered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. But it was not until Sunday that the campaign officially began, which is supposed to administer a first dose – two drops to be swallowed – to at least 90% of children under the age of ten in the territory.
The UN has sent 1.2 million doses of the nOPV2 vaccine. The second dose is due four weeks after the first.
On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Israel had agreed to a series of three-day “humanitarian pauses” in the center, then the south and north of the Gaza Strip.
Denying “reports of a general ceasefire” to allow this vaccination campaign, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that Israel “will only authorize a humanitarian corridor.”
Due in part to damaged roads and displaced populations, the UN had indicated that it might need an additional day in each area.