Thousands of children in Gaza City were receiving a second dose of polio vaccine this weekend in an effort that was delayed by intense Israeli bombardment and mass evacuation orders in northern Gaza, the United Nations and other aid agencies said.
The second phase of the vaccination campaign was originally set to begin on Oct. 23 across the north of the territory, but it was postponed due to a lack of assurances about pauses in the fighting and bombardment to ensure the safety of health workers, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said in a statement on Friday.
The first round of vaccinations in September took place across northern Gaza. Since then, the Israeli military has launched an intense offensive in northern Gaza against what it has said is a resurgence of Hamas in the area.
A humanitarian pause for the second phase of the vaccination campaign was only assured for Gaza City, according to the U.N. agencies. They said that around 15,000 children under 10 in northern towns where the Israeli military has been carrying out the offensive over the last few weeks “remain inaccessible and will be missed during the campaign, compromising its effectiveness.”
COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, said on Sunday that 58,604 children under 10 had been vaccinated in northern Gaza since the second phase of the campaign began a day earlier. It added that Israel would continue to work to “facilitate an effective vaccination campaign.”
The Gazan Health Ministry confirmed the number of vaccinations, and the campaign was expected to continue through Monday.
The campaign was not entirely without incident, according to humanitarian officials.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said on X that his agency had received a report that six people, including four children, were wounded on Saturday when one of the health care centers distributing the vaccines was struck “in an area where a humanitarian pause was agreed to allow vaccination to proceed.” He did not say who had struck the clinic.
An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, replied to that post on X, saying that an initial review by the military showed it had not struck in that area at that time.
UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, said separately that the vehicle of one of its staff members who was working on the polio campaign “came under fire by what we believe to be a quadcopter” while driving in northern Gaza on Saturday. The agency said that although the staff member was not injured, the attack illustrated the “grave consequences of the indiscriminate strikes on civilians in the Gaza Strip.” The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions about the incident.
Aid agencies sought to start a vaccination campaign in Gaza after traces of poliovirus were found in local wastewater in July, and a 10-month-old boy was confirmed in August to be the first resident of Gaza to be paralyzed by poliovirus in 25 years.
In September, temporary pauses in the war agreed to by Israel and Hamas allowed aid workers to immunize about 640,000 children under 10 who were at risk of the disease. The campaign began in central Gaza, then moved to the south and ended in the northern area.
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