It enabled more than 500,000 children under ten to receive a second dose. The polio vaccination booster campaign has ended in the Gaza Strip, despite continued fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian armed movements, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday. 'UNICEF.
“The booster vaccination campaign against polio in the Gaza Strip ended yesterday, with a total of 556,774 children under the age of ten having received a second dose of polio vaccine,” the official said. WHO in a joint statement. For the UN agency, this is a “remarkable result given the extremely difficult circumstances” while thousands of children are in “inaccessible areas” of the north of the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army launched a major offensive a month ago. Between 7,000 and 10,000 children remain “vulnerable to the polio virus” in this area.
The campaign was a “success,” the Israeli body overseeing civil affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Cogat) also welcomed in a statement published Wednesday.
Vaccination was primarily managed by UN agencies, including WHO, UNICEF, and the Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), which remains the “main provider of primary health care in the Gaza Strip.” , according to Louise Wateridge, head of emergency operations at Unrwa. The campaign was launched on September 1, after the confirmation of a first case of polio in the Palestinian territory, for the first time in more than 20 years, against a backdrop of 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 extremely contagious disease, which can cause paralysis.
The head of the WHO announced on Saturday that a vaccination center had been “hit” in the north of the Gaza Strip, causing several injuries, without giving details. A member of the Gaza Civil Defense said that debris from a missile fired by an Israeli drone fell on a wall of the health center, located in the west of Gaza City. The Israeli army denied shooting at the vaccination center.
Faced with the urgency of the needs and while awaiting a “ceasefire”, UN agencies have stressed that humanitarian pauses “must be systematically used beyond emergency intervention efforts against the polio.”
