United Nations officials said that health workers began vaccinating children in northern Gaza against polio on Tuesday but noted that convoys carrying critical supplies of fuel and medicine were facing increasing obstruction and delays by Israeli forces.
The main U.N. aid agency operating in Gaza said that the Israeli military had detained a convoy of international and local staff members from various U.N. bodies at gunpoint just after they crossed the Wadi Gaza checkpoint on Monday and held them for more than eight hours.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. aid agency, UNRWA, said in a social media post just after midnight in Gaza that the team had been threatened with detention. He added that armored U.N. vehicles in the convoy had suffered “heavy damage” from bulldozers.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had intelligence suggesting there were “Palestinian suspects” with the convoy and that it had been detained so they could be questioned. It did not immediately respond to queries about the episode, which highlighted the challenges facing the vaccination campaign and what U.N. officials say is increasing Israeli obstruction of aid deliveries to Gaza.
The United Nations delivered the first of two doses of oral vaccine to 446,000 Gazan children in the center and south of Gaza in two operations earlier this month as part of a campaign negotiated with Israel to halt the quick-spreading polio virus. The global body aimed to vaccinate roughly 200,000 more children in the north of Gaza in the third phase, lasting through Thursday, and then to repeat the whole operation in a month’s time to deliver the second oral vaccine dose.
The World Health Organization said that the convoy halted on Monday consisted of two missions previously coordinated with the Israeli authorities, one of which was to deliver fuel for vehicles carrying vaccination teams and the other to carry fuel and other supplies for Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
“Unfortunately, it’s not isolated,” the W.H.O. spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said of the convoy’s detention, reporting that four attempts by the agency to deliver supplies to Al-Shifa in the last four days had failed. He added that the number of applications for aid deliveries that ended up being rejected by the Israeli authorities had more than doubled in August, compared with previous months.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the claims.
The anti-polio campaign kicked off a little more than a week ago, aiming to prevent an outbreak of the quick-spreading disease among Gaza’s children. Both Hamas and Israel agreed to pauses in the fighting to allow the vaccinations to take place, but much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, and both medical workers and residents seeking vaccines must navigate blocked and broken roads and expose themselves to widespread lawlessness to reach the vaccination sites.
While the polio virus has been eradicated in many parts of the world, it was identified in Gaza’s wastewater in July, and global health authorities warn that an outbreak could rapidly spread beyond the devastated territory. Israel’s nearly yearlong military offensive has disrupted routine immunizations, decimated Gaza’s health and sanitation systems and trapped hundreds of thousands of displaced people in overcrowded conditions — creating a ripe environment for the highly infectious disease to spread.
Adding to the challenges in northern Gaza, the Israeli military had on Monday ordered a new round of evacuations of several neighborhoods in Beit Lahia and Jabaliya, including in areas that the United Nations said had been designated to be part of the vaccination campaign.
The Israeli military issued the orders after saying on Sunday night that projectiles had been fired from the area. One of the projectiles was intercepted, the military said, and the other had crashed off the coast of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.
More than 55 evacuation orders covering up to 86 percent of the entire Gaza Strip were in effect as of Monday, the U.N. office for humanitarian affairs said, adding that they were “deepening the humanitarian crisis for hundreds of thousands of people, especially those who have been displaced multiple times.”
The post Polio Shots Begin in Northern Gaza Despite Israel’s Detaining U.N. Convoy appeared first on New York Times.
