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The second phase of a campaign to vaccinate children in Gaza against polio began on Thursday in southern Gaza, the World Health Organization said, continuing a frantic drive to avert a deadly outbreak in the war-battered territory.
Israel has agreed to brief, staggered pauses in its military offensive in Gaza to allow health officials to conduct vaccinations. But underscoring the limited nature of the pauses, hours after the first phase of the campaign wrapped up in central Gaza on Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike hit the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the largest in the area, Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported.
Four people were killed, including women and children sheltering in tents around the hospital, Wafa said on Thursday. Video taken by Reuters news agency and published Thursday showed tents erected by displaced Gazans lying in ruins, their wooden beams flattened, and people’s belongings strewed in the hospital’s courtyard.
“We sought refuge in a safe place, in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, displaced and sleeping peacefully, we found nothing but the airstrikes hitting us,” one woman, Iqbal Al-Zeidi, told Reuters.
In the campaign’s first phase, the W.H.O. vaccinated more than 187,000 children over three days. The second phase was expected to take place in southern Gaza over the next three days, before a third and final phase in northern Gaza. The effort aims to vaccinate a total of about 640,000 children under 10 against the disease, after the first polio case in Gaza in 25 years was recorded in a nearly 1-year-old boy last month.
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The W.H.O., an agency of the United Nations, said it had exceeded its target for the first phase by 30,000 children, as more than 2,180 workers fanned out across hospitals, temporary schools and camps for displaced people, visiting tents and areas destroyed by nearly 11 months of fighting.
Some members of Israel’s Parliament have criticized the W.H.O. for working on the effort with UNRWA, the main aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government has accused employees of the agency of having ties to Hamas. Last month, the U.N. fired nine UNRWA workers after it said an internal investigation had found they “may have been involved” in the Hamas-led attack in Israel last October that touched off the war.
