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UNICEF is pushing for a pause in the fighting to allow health workers to get two doses to every child, after Gaza recorded its first polio case in 25 years.
More than 1.2 million doses of the polio vaccine arrived in Gaza on Monday, in preparation for an expansive effort to inoculate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said.
The vaccines landed after the first case of the disease in the territory in 25 years was confirmed earlier this month.
UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, said it was delivering the vaccines in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA; and other groups. UNRWA officials said they hoped to deliver the first vaccines to Gazan children starting on Saturday.
But the campaign will be “a very difficult operation and its success will depend very much on the conditions on the ground at the time,” Sam Rose, a senior official from the agency, said at a news briefing on Monday.
The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to begin the campaign to inoculate children under 10 were underway. It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to medical centers in Gaza, particularly after the U.N. said on Monday that its already hamstrung humanitarian operations had been brought to a temporary halt after the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Deir al-Balah, where the agency has its central operations.
But a senior U.N. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, said at a briefing on Monday that there was no change to plans to begin polio vaccinations, despite the fact that the temporary pause in the U.N.’s humanitarian mission.
