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The campaign to begin next week to administer the needed second polio vaccine to hundreds of thousands of children in the war-hit Gaza Strip will be “more complex” than the first, the United Nations said Friday. .
The United Nations health and children’s agency said it was preparing to begin administering booster shots to around 591,700 children under the age of 10 across Gaza from Monday.
This follows the first round of vaccinations carried out between September 1 and 12, which the World Health Organization’s representative for the Palestinian Authority, Rick Pieperkorn, hailed on Friday as a “huge achievement”.
The vaccination campaign began after the besieged Gaza Strip reported its first confirmed polio case in 25 years.
As with the previous round, the next round of operations will be carried out in three phases, supported by localized “humanitarian pauses” in fighting. It will first take place in central Gaza, then in the south, and finally in the territory’s most difficult-to-reach north.
Pieperkorn told reporters via video link from Jerusalem that he was “confident” that hundreds of teams were ready to roll out the second stage of the campaign.
But he acknowledged he was “concerned about developments in the north” where Israel has dramatically escalated its operations and issued a series of evacuation orders.
“We are concerned,” UNICEF’s Jan Gough agreed.
“The situation on the ground is really much more complicated this time,” she told a news conference, also from Jerusalem.
She stressed the need to fully vaccinate at least 90 percent of children to ensure the prevention of the spread of polio.
“It is vital that local humanitarian moratoriums are not only respected in the north, but that people are not forced to move from one area to another,” she said.
Gough stressed that the UN has held multiple meetings with Israeli authorities and received confirmation from the Israeli government agency Kogat that the humanitarian moratorium will be implemented.
“This worked last round and I’m sure it will work again,” she said.
“It’s difficult, but possible.”
The Gaza war began on October 7 last year, when Hamas militants stormed across the border, carrying out the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
The militants took 251 people hostage in the attack, leaving 1,206 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli statistics.
According to the Hamas-run autonomous region’s health ministry, 42,065 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, most of them civilians, a figure the United Nations says is reliable.
apo/nl/rjm/giv
