Israel agrees to limited pause in fighting in Gaza for polio vaccinations, UN says
Health workers say they aim to vaccinate 640,000 children under ten over the three day pause, as ITV News Correspondent Debi Edward reports.
Limited pauses in fighting in Gaza have been agreed upon to allow for polio vaccinations for hundreds of thousands of children, the UN's World Health Organisation has announced.
It comes after a baby contracted the first confirmed case of the disease in 25 years in the Palestinian territory.
Described as “humanitarian pauses” that will last three days in different areas of the war-ravaged territory, the vaccination campaign will start Sunday in central Gaza, said WHO representative Rik Peeperkorn.
That will be followed by another three-day pause in southern Gaza and then another in northern Gaza, he said, noting the pauses will last eight or nine hours each day.
Mr Peeperkorn said he believes more days would be needed to complete the vaccinations.
Health workers say they aim to vaccinate 640,000 children under ten and that the campaign has been coordinated with Israeli authorities.
"I’m not going to say this is the ideal way forward. But this is a workable way forward,” Mr Peeperkorn said. “It will happen and should happen because we have an agreement," he added.
These humanitarian pauses are not part of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that mediators from the US, Egypt and Qatar have long been seeking.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity as plans had not been finalised, said there is expected to be some sort of tactical pause to allow vaccinations to take place.
The Israeli army has previously announced limited pauses in limited areas to allow international humanitarian operations.
Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, said the militant group welcomed the push for a pause in Gaza to implement the vaccination drive. He said: "We are ready to cooperate with international organizations to secure this campaign."
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The WHO is joined in the vaccination effort by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and other partners.
Each organisation has been assigned a role in the technical and strategic “micro-plan” to execute the vaccine campaign.For weeks, the organisations have emphasised that some kind of halt in fighting — what they are calling a “polio pause”— would be crucial to the effort’s success, and even to contain the disease from spreading to the broader region.
The WHO said health workers need to vaccinate at least 90% of children in Gaza to stop the transmission of polio.
The campaign comes after ten month old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste.
The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before October 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza.
He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
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