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Israel has halted some of its military operations in Gaza to allow health workers to launch a polio vaccine drive for some 640,000 Palestinian children. The humanitarian agreement struck last week will see Israel’s Defence Forces observe three staggered pauses of fighting in central, southern and northern Gaza, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) officials.
The first pause began yesterday in central Gaza, where health workers will administer their vaccines before moving to southern Gaza and finishing the campaign in the north over a total of nine days. WHO’s representative for the Palestinian territories, Rik Peeperkorn, told reporters the pauses will last from 6am until 3pm and that each block of three days can be extended by an extra day if health workers say it is required.
Israel’s agreement to humanitarian pauses came a week after WHO officials confirmed a Palestinian baby had been paralysed after contracting the virus – the first confirmed case in Gaza for more than a quarter-century. The vaccination campaign in Gaza is targeting 640,000 children under 10, who will each receive two drops of oral polio vaccine in two rounds – the second to be given four weeks after the first.
‘I’m not going to say this is the ideal way forward. But this is a workable way forward,’ Peeperkorn said, adding that the humanitarian pauses are critical so families can bring their children to get vaccinated and get back to where they are staying by 3pm to avoid the Israeli onslaught. ‘We have an agreement on that, so we expect that all parties will stick to that,’ he said. WHO said health workers need to vaccinate at least 90% of children in Gaza to stop the transmission of polio.
The campaign will involve more than 2,100 health workers from UN agencies and the Gaza Ministry of Health, working at hundreds of sites across Gaza and with mobile teams. But the humanitarian pauses do not constitute a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that mediators US, Egypt and Qatar have long been seeking, including in talks that are ongoing this week.
Robert Wood, US deputy ambassador to the UN, urged Israel to avoid further civilian evacuation orders during the pauses and said workers need security to vaccinate children. ‘It is especially important for Israel to facilitate access for agencies carrying out the vaccination campaign and for it to ensure periods of calm and refrain from military operations during vaccination campaign periods,’ he said.
The campaign comes after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste, scientists say. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before October 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and prompted the Israeli Defence Forces to launch a retaliatory offensive on Gaza. He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decades-long effort by the WHO and partners to wipe out the disease.
Healthcare workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis unleashed by Israel´s offensive grows. While central Gaza saw a long-awaited break from fighting yesterday, Israel’s military pressed on with a deadly operation in the West Bank and killed five people that it said were part of a militia, including local commander Mohammed Jaber.
Israel said Jaber was killed Thursday along with four other militants in a shootout after the five had hidden inside a mosque, adding that he was linked to numerous attacks on Israelis, including a deadly shooting in June, and was planning more. Jaber had become something of a Palestinian hero earlier in the year when he was reported killed in an Israeli operation, only to make a surprise appearance at the funeral of other militants, where he was hoisted onto the shoulders of a cheering crowd. The Islamic Jihad also confirmed his death yesterday. Israel’s search-and-arrest raids continued for hours Thursday, including the city of Jenin. Firefights also erupted in Fara’a, a Palestinian urban refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, where the Israeli army said it struck and killed a group of militants travelling in a car. Their militant affiliations were not immediately clear.
The army also said it uncovered caches of weapons, explosive devices and other military equipment inside a mosque in Fara’a and arrested another militant in Tulkarem, where a member of Israel’s paramilitary Border Police was wounded. Israel says the raids across the northern West Bank – which have killed a total of 16 people since late Tuesday – are aimed at preventing attacks. But Palestinians see them as a widening of the war in Gaza and an effort to perpetuate Israel’s decades-long military rule over the territory. The raids drew alarm from the UN and neighboring Jordan, as well as from British and French leaders, who stressed the urgency of cease-fire in Gaza after nearly 11 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas. Meanwhile, Medics at al-Awda Hospital in central Gaza said Thursday nine Palestinians from the same family – including two women and five young children – were killed in an Israeli strike on an apartment building in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Israel did not immediately offer comment on the intended target of its attack.
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