DM Monitoring
NEW YORK: 0The Israeli military and Palestinian militant group Hamas have agreed to three separate, zoned three-day pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip to allow for the vaccination of some 640,000 children against polio, a senior WHO official said on Thursday.
The vaccination campaign is due to start on Sunday, said Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization’s senior official for the Palestinian territories. He said the agreement was for the pauses to take place between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. (0300-1200 GMT)
He said the campaign would start in central Gaza with a three-day pause in fighting, then move to southern Gaza, where there would be another three-day pause, followed by northern Gaza. Peeperkorn added that there was an agreement to extend the humanitarian pause in each zone to a fourth day if needed.
The WHO confirmed on Aug. 23 that at least one baby has been paralyzed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years. The U.N. Security Council will meet later on Thursday on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
“We are ready to cooperate with international organizations to secure this campaign, serving and protecting more than 650,000 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas official Basem Naim told media.
The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit (COGAT) said on Wednesday that the vaccination campaign would be conducted in coordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses that will allow the population to reach the medical centers where the vaccinations will be administered.”
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7 when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has since killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
Earlier this month, UN chief Antonio Guterres called Friday for two seven-day breaks in the Gaza war to vaccinate more than 640,000 children against polio, which has been detected in the territory’s wastewater.
The UN health and children’s agencies said they had detailed plans to reach children across the besieged Palestinian territory and could start this month.
But that would require pauses in the 10-month old war between Israel and Hamas, they said.
“Preventing and containing the spread of polio will take a massive, coordinated and urgent effort,” UN Secretary General Guterres told reporters at the organisation’s headquarters in New York.
