Israeli authorities have agreed to a series of three-day “humanitarian pauses” in central, southern and northern Gaza to allow vaccinations of 640,000 children against polio to begin on Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on 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” every day, said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative in Gaza, during a video press conference, specifying that the same system is then planned for the south and then the 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 – expected each day between early morning and early afternoon – to be extended in that case, he said.
“We stress the importance for all parties to respect the commitments” on these pauses, insisted the number two of the WHO, Mike Ryan, before the Security Council.
Because “at least 90% coverage is necessary during each phase of the campaign to stop the epidemic and prevent international spread,” he insisted, assuring that Israel had also committed to “suspending evacuation orders for the implementation of the two phases of the campaign.”
He said that 1.26 million doses of the nOPV2 vaccine (which consists of the oral administration of two drops) had already arrived in Gaza and that another 400,000 doses were expected “soon”.
Not a ceasefire
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein simply told X that his country was coordinating with the UN “a large-scale operation to vaccinate children against polio in the Gaza Strip.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday night that it was not a “ceasefire to vaccinate against polio, but rather the provision of certain places” in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has indicated that it “supports” this “humanitarian truce”.
“It is vital that the campaign be carried out without delay,” insisted the deputy American ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, calling on Israel to “ensure periods of calm and to refrain from military operations” during these periods, as well as to “avoid new evacuation orders.”
After 25 years of absence in the Palestinian territory, a first case of polio was recently confirmed in Gaza in a 10-month-old baby in Deir al-Balah, after the detection of the poliovirus in wastewater samples collected at the end of 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 four weeks after the first, the WHO said.
A widespread threat just forty years ago, polio – which can cause irreversible paralysis in just a few hours – has largely disappeared from the world thanks to vaccines.
But another form of poliovirus may be spreading: one that mutated from the source originally contained in the oral polio vaccine (OPV). It is this vaccine-derived poliovirus that has been found in Gaza.