A large-scale polio vaccination campaign began in the Gaza Strip on Sunday. The Palestinian Health Ministry, controlled by Hamas, reported that 72,600 children were vaccinated on the operation's first day. The UN aims to vaccinate 640,000 children in the first phase.
The vaccination campaign is being held in central Gaza until Wednesday, after which it will continue to the northern and southern parts of the strip.
Israeli sources said the vaccination campaign will continue until September 9, for eight hours each day. To facilitate the campaign, the IDF agreed to temporary humanitarian pauses in the areas where the campaign will focus at each stage, between 6:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.
The campaign is divided into three stages, each lasting three days, with the option of extending each stage by an additional day. The campaign will be in central Gaza on Tuesday, then move to the south and finally reach the north. "A situation assessment will be conducted regarding the area at the end of each regional vaccination campaign," the IDF said in a statement.
Therefore, the brief cease-fire in central Gaza ended Sunday afternoon, according to an Israeli statement. The Prime Minister's Office clarified over the weekend that "reports of a general cease-fire to allow polio vaccinations in Gaza are false."
"Israel will only allow a humanitarian corridor for the vaccination teams to pass through and designated safe areas will be established for a few hours to administer the vaccines. Israel considers it important to prevent a polio outbreak in the Gaza Strip, including to avoid the spread of epidemics in the entire region," the statement read.
The vaccination campaign's goal, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and UNRWA, is to vaccinate 640,000 children under the age of 10 across the Gaza Strip both inside and outside the humanitarian zones in the Palestinian enclave.
Each child will receive two drops in the first dose, and another large-scale vaccination campaign will be needed to give them a second dose four weeks later. A total of 1.3 million vaccines (administered in oral drops) have already been transferred via the Kerem Shalom crossing to a storage facility in the Strip, where they're kept refrigerated, and another shipment of 400,000 additional doses is expected to arrive in the coming days.
According to Gaza's Health Ministry, the vaccinations are being administered at 160 different locations across the Gaza Strip, including hospitals and schools. Most of these sites are in the Khan Younis area in the southern part of the Strip and in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of refugees are currently located and the number of children is the highest. UNICEF noted the vaccines will be transported to the various locations by over 2,000 volunteers.
WHO reported the first case of a type 2 polio patient in the Gaza Strip in 25 years last week. A 10-month-old baby was left paralyzed from the lower part of his left leg as a result of the virus.
Although his condition is stable now, the case raises significant concern given the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. The WHO's statement came a week after the Gaza Health Ministry reported the case. It was also reported two additional Palestinians in Gaza may have contracted the virus.