A new polio vaccination campaign was officially launched on Monday in the center of the Gaza Strip, where at least two Israeli strikes have left several people dead in recent hours, according to the Civil Defense of the Palestinian territory.
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“This morning, the United Nations and its partners will begin administering the second round of polio vaccines to children in the central area of the Gaza Strip,” said representatives of the United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees. (Unrwa).
Deeming this second wave of vaccination “essential”, Unrwa specifies that more than 1,000 humanitarian workers are mobilized in “less than two weeks”.
As during the previous vaccination campaign, in early September, the United Nations announced that “humanitarian pauses” would allow the vaccination of around 590,000 children, from birth to 10 years old.
During the night from Sunday to Monday, this part of the Gaza Strip where many people displaced by the war are crowded into makeshift camps experienced “another night of horror”, in the words of the head of the Unrwa, Philippe Lazzarini, on X.
He cites an “airstrike” in the courtyard of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where displaced people lived, as well as “an Unrwa school hit” in Nuseirat, where “20 people would have been killed.
Unrwa specified that vaccinations should have taken place in this school this Monday. “We had to cancel the vaccination campaign there due to the significant damage,” noted Mr. Lazzarini.
The entire Gaza Strip has been ravaged by the war between Hamas and Israel which has lasted for more than a year, triggered by the unprecedented attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Poliomyelitis reappeared there for the first time in more than 20 years, against a backdrop of health and humanitarian disaster. The network of pipes has been largely destroyed and wastewater stagnates in the open air, often in the immediate vicinity of dense population centers, which is conducive to the development of this highly contagious disease, which can cause paralysis.
This second campaign aims to administer “a booster dose of the vaccine”, explains to AFP Mahmoud Abu Saleel, an employee of the Gaza Ministry of Health present at a vaccination center in Deir al-Balah.
“There is a good turnout, people are convinced of the importance of vaccination,” he says happily, in front of lines of children opening their mouths to receive the oral vaccine.
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