Polio vaccinations began in northern Gaza on Tuesday, Gazan health officials said, hours after the main U.N. aid agency operating in the enclave said the Israeli military had detained its convoy at gunpoint as it was traveling there.
Israeli forces stopped the convoy of international and local staff members from various U.N. agencies, just after they crossed the Wadi Gaza checkpoint on Monday and held them for more than eight hours, according to Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency, UNRWA.
He said in a social media post just after midnight in Gaza that the team had been threatened with detention and added that armored U.N. vehicles in the convoy had suffered “heavy damage” from bulldozers. He questioned whether the campaign could still start on Tuesday as scheduled.
On Tuesday morning, the Gazan Ministry of Health said that vaccinations had begun in the north, and would continue through Thursday.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had intelligence suggesting there were “Palestinian suspects” with the convoy, and that it was detained so they could be questioned. It did not immediately respond to queries about the episode.
The episode highlighted the challenges of the campaign, which 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 is destroyed and both medical workers and people seeking vaccines must navigate blocked and broken roads and expose themselves to widespread lawlessness to reach the vaccination sites.
While the poliovirus has been eradicated in many parts of the world, it was identified in Gaza wastewater in July, and global health authorities warn that an outbreak could rapidly spread beyond the devastated territory.
The convoy had been closely coordinated with Israeli authorities, Mr. Lazzarini said. But U.N. convoys in Gaza, as well as those from other aid groups, have repeatedly been detained or come under fire by the Israeli military despite such coordination. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for Secretary General António Guterres, said the U.N. was working to establish the facts surrounding the convoy and that the organization’s “No. 1 priority is the safety and security of our colleagues.”
The polio vaccination effort in northern Gaza aims to inoculate approximately 150,000 children in the area, according to World Health Organization estimates. Health officials had described the first two phases of the campaign in central and southern Gaza as a relative success, but one that relied heavily on the agreements to pause fighting.
It had been unclear on Monday afternoon whether those agreements would hold in the north after the Israeli military once again ordered Palestinians to leave 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.”
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