The 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 World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Thursday.
The vaccination campaign is due to start on Sunday, September 1st, said Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO’s senior official for the Palestinian territories. He said the agreement was for the pauses to take place between 6am and 3pm local time.
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. Mr Peeperkorn added that there was an agreement to extend the humanitarian pause in each zone to a fourth day if needed.
The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit said the vaccination campaign would be conducted “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses that will allow the population to reach the medical centres where the vaccinations will be administered”.
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The WHO confirmed last week that at least one baby has been paralysed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
The organisation named the baby as Abdul-Rahman Abu Al-Jidyan, whose first birthday will be on September 1st.
His mother Nivine Abu Al-Jidyan said she feared for her son after she was told by health officials they could do little to help him.
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“I was shocked that my son got this disease amid the war and the closure of border crossings, under these conditions and lack of medicine for him, it’s a shock. Would he remain like this?” she said from a tent in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. “He is my only baby boy. It’s his right to travel and be treated; it’s his right to walk, run and move like before ... It is unfair that he stays thrown in the tent without care or attention.”
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu this week denied media reports Israel was preparing for a generalised humanitarian truce, saying that a more limited plan had been presented.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces continued to bombard areas across the Gaza Strip on Thursday in their battle against Hamas-led militants. Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes had killed at least 34 people over the day.
One strike on a house in Gaza City killed eight Palestinians, including children, they said, while three others were killed when an Israeli missile hit a motorcycle in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7th when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the enclave has killed more than 40,600 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.
Elsewhere, the Israeli military said on Thursday its troops killed five Palestinian militants who were hiding inside a mosque in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, in one of its largest assaults in the Israeli-occupied territory for months.
The operationbegan in the early hours of Wednesday with hundreds of Israeli troops backed by helicopters, drones and armoured personnel carriers raiding the flashpoint cities of Tulkarm, Jenin and areas in the Jordan Valley.
Clashes with Israeli forces in the West Bank have escalated since Israel’s war with Hamas militants began in Gaza nearly 11 months ago.
More than 660 – combatants and civilians – have been killed, by Palestinian tallies, some by Jewish settlers who have carried out frequent vigilante-style attacks on West Bank Palestinian communities.
– Reuters