Palestinian health authorities, in collaboration with United Nations agencies, launched a large-scale vaccination campaign against polio in the Gaza Strip. The initiative aims to prevent an outbreak in the region, which has been devastated by the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
Moussa Abed, director of primary health care at Gaza’s health ministry, stated that local health officials, along with the UN and NGOs, have begun administering polio vaccinations in the central region of Gaza.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Israel had agreed to three-day “humanitarian pauses” to facilitate the vaccination efforts, which officially started on Sunday.
The campaign will initially focus on central Gaza, with plans to extend to southern and northern regions. It targets over 640,000 children under the age of 10, with each child receiving two doses of the vaccine. Michael Ryan, WHO deputy director-general, informed the UN Security Council that 1.26 million doses of the oral vaccine have already been delivered to Gaza, with an additional 400,000 on the way.
Earlier this month, the Palestinian health ministry, based in Ramallah, confirmed through tests conducted in Jordan that a 10-month-old unvaccinated baby from central Gaza had contracted polio. The poliovirus, which spreads mainly through sewage and contaminated water, is a growing concern in Gaza as the conflict continues. The disease primarily affects children under five, leading to deformities, paralysis, and in severe cases, death.
Juliette Touma, communications director of UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, emphasized the importance of this vaccination campaign, calling it “one of the most complex in the world.” She stressed the urgency of ensuring that all children in Gaza and Israel are vaccinated to prevent the disease from spreading further, describing the effort as a “race against time.”
Despite initial concerns about the vaccine’s safety, many parents in Gaza, like Bakr Deeb, decided to bring their children for vaccination after receiving assurances from health officials. Abed reiterated that the vaccine is “100 percent safe.”
The current conflict in Gaza began after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli official figures. Israel’s retaliatory military actions have since claimed at least 40,691 lives in Gaza, with the UN rights office reporting that the majority of the victims are women and children.
I am an experienced writer, analyst, and author. My exposure in English journalism spans more than 28 years. In the past, I have been working with daily The Muslim (Lahore Bureau), daily Business Recorder (Lahore/Islamabad Bureaus), Daily Times, Islamabad, daily The Nation (Lahore and Karachi). With daily The Nation, I have served as Resident Editor, Karachi. Since 2009, I have been working as a Freelance Writer/Editor for American organizations.
