A campaign to vaccinate children in Gaza against polio and prevent the spread of the virus began on Saturday, a day ahead of a large-scale rollout and Israel and the World Health Organization have agreed to a temporary truce in fighting.
Children in Gaza have begun receiving doses of the vaccine, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said at a news conference. Associated Press reporters saw about a dozen infants receiving doses of the vaccine at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Saturday afternoon local time.
“I was terrified and waiting for the vaccine to come and for everyone to get it,” said Amal Shaheen, whose daughter received a dose.
Abdel Karim Hana/AP
The United Nations World Health Organization said earlier this week that Israel should suspend some of its operations in Gaza from Sunday to allow health workers to roll out their vaccination campaign. administer polio vaccines to some 650,000 Palestinian children.
“There must be a ceasefire so that the teams can reach all the people targeted by this campaign,” said Dr. Yousef Abu Al-Rish, deputy health minister, describing scenes of sewage flowing into crowded tent camps in Gaza.
However, in a statement released Saturday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that “reports of a general ceasefire aimed at administering polio vaccines in Gaza are false.”
Instead, Netanyahu’s office said Israel “will only allow a humanitarian corridor” to allow polio vaccines to pass through Gaza.
“Cornered areas will be established for the safe administration of vaccines for a few hours,” Netanyahu’s office said. “Israel considers it important to prevent the outbreak of polio in the Gaza Strip, particularly in order to prevent the spread of epidemics throughout the region.”
Abdel Karim Hana/AP
U.N. officials said the pause would last at least nine hours and was the result of an agreement with the WHO, unrelated to ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Israel, Hamas and regional mediators.
The campaign targets children who have not been vaccinated
The campaign comes after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was left partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their feces, scientists say. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before October 7, when the vaccination took place. Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza.
He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who have not been vaccinated because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
The boy’s mother, Neveen Abu El Jidyan, said CBS News Tuesday She has been unable to do much for her son because of the dire living conditions in the Palestinian displacement camp where they live.
“We haven’t given him any treatment. We live in a tent and there is no medicine,” El Jidyan, 35, told CBS News.
El Jidyan, who has nine other children, was forced to move her family from northern Gaza to a tent in Deir el-Balah because of the war.
Abdul Rahman was developing normally and was almost walking, El Jidyan said, when he began vomiting and developing a fever.
“I took him to the hospital and they told me there was nothing they could do. They know his condition, but there is no treatment,” she told CBS News. “When the virus hit him, he changed overnight.”
El Jidyan said she believes the unsanitary conditions her family was forced to live in were the cause of her son’s illness.
“Our living conditions: we don’t have clean water, we don’t have clean food. We live in a tent and nothing is clean here,” she said.
Polio has been eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decades-long effort by WHO and partners to eradicate the disease.
Health professionals in Gaza have warned against risk of polio epidemic for monthsas the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened during the war that erupted after Hamas-led militants stormed southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and abducting about 250. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which did not specify how many were militants.
Palestinians remain on guard
Hours earlier, Gaza’s health ministry said hospitals had received 89 deaths on Saturday, including 26 killed in an overnight Israeli bombardment, and 205 wounded – one of the highest daily tolls in months.
Meanwhile, parts of the West Bank remained on edge Saturday as the Israeli military continued its large-scale military campaign, the deadliest since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, and two car bombings by Palestinian militants near Israeli settlements wounded three soldiers.
Two car bombs exploded early Saturday in Gush Etzion, an Israeli settlement bloc in the West Bank. The Israeli army killed the two Palestinian attackers after the bombs exploded at a compound in Karmei Zur and a gas station, the Israeli army said. Three Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded.
Palestinian health officials said Israel was holding the bodies of the attackers, naming them as Muhammad Marqa and Zoodhi Afifeh.
Majdi Mohammed / AP
Hamas did not claim the men as its fighters but called the attack a “heroic operation” and “another slap in the face to the security system of the occupation” in a statement released Saturday morning. The Palestinian militant group had said earlier this month, after a bombing in Tel Aviv, that it would continue such attacks.
The bombings came as Israel continues its massive raids – destruction of infrastructure, airstrikes and shootings – on urban refugee camps in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm in the volatile northern West Bank. About 20 Palestinians have been killed since the Israeli incursion began on Tuesday, raising international concern that the war could spread beyond the Gaza Strip.
Israel has presented the operation as a strategy to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, which have increased since the start of the war in the West Bank, particularly near settlements that the international community largely considers illegal. In return, the Palestinian Health Ministry has noted an increase in the number of Palestinian deaths caused by Israeli forces, with 663 deaths in the West Bank in the nearly 11 months since the start of the war.
In central Gaza, Israeli airstrikes hit a multi-story building housing displaced people in and around Nuseirat, a refugee camp built in central Gaza, further south in Khan Younis and north in Gaza City, hospital officials in the three areas said Saturday morning.
The dead included a doctor and his family and a child whose right leg had been amputated earlier, according to an initial casualty list compiled by the hospital and images released Saturday by civil defense officials operating under the Hamas government in Gaza.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have been trying for months to broker a ceasefire that would allow the release of the remaining hostages. But negotiations have repeatedly stalled, with Netanyahu promising a “total victory” over Hamas and the militant group demanding a lasting ceasefire and a full withdrawal from the territory.
