THE UNITED Nations World Health Organization (WHO) has stressed that ‘peace’ is the best solution to save Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip, as a polio vaccination campaign gets underway in the war-torn territory amid daily eight-hour pauses in Israeli strikes.
‘Children in Gaza are receiving much-needed polio vaccines today. Ultimately, the best vaccine for these children is peace,’ WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on social media platform X on Sunday.
His remarks came as the vaccination campaign began after Israel agreed to eight-hour pauses in its strikes on designated sites in Gaza to allow health workers to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children against polio.
According to Rik Peeperkorn, WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories, the so-called ‘humanitarian pauses’ began on Sunday in central Gaza and would last for three days.
That will be followed by another similar pause in southern Gaza and then another in northern Gaza.
The campaign aims to vaccinate 640,000 children under 10, Peeperkorn told reporters via video conference on Thursday.
His announcement came after a 10-month-old baby was partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste.
Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian, who was born just before Israel’s war on Gaza erupted on October 7th last year, was one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the war.
On Monday, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said 87,000 Gazan children had received the first dose of the polio vaccine as the inoculation drive continued for the second day.
‘Efforts are ongoing to provide children with this key vaccine, but what they need most is a ceasefire now,’ the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said in a post on X.
According to WHO, at least 90% of children in Gaza should be vaccinated to stop the transmission of polio.
The agreement reached between the UN health agency and Israel on limited pauses came as the polio outbreak in Gaza threatens Israelis too.
Foreign Policy, however, said in a report that Thursday’s announcement is ‘insufficient’ to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, ‘because parents will be required to bring their children to those sites while combat elsewhere in Gaza rages; most parents simply won’t risk it.
‘That fighting also makes impossible the kind of active outreach by healthcare workers among Gaza’s displaced population needed to obtain the near-universal vaccination required to stop the outbreak.’
Referring to Gaza’s polio outbreak as ‘a barometer of the catastrophic public health conditions created by the Israeli military’, the report said what many Israelis don’t realise is that the systematic Israeli assaults on health care and public health infrastructure in Gaza have ‘now come back to haunt them’.
According to the report, at least 175,000 vulnerable Israeli children, the offspring of the ultra-Orthodox are ‘at risk of contracting the disease’.
The report stressed that the only way to protect the unvaccinated ultra-Orthodox, who are ‘notorious for their opposition to vaccinations’ is to control polio in Gaza.
‘The Israeli government now has an incentive to agree to the prolonged humanitarian pauses needed for a successful vaccination campaign,’ Foreign Policy said, noting that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs their (ultra-Orthodox) support to remain in power.
The aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, stressed that Israel’s strikes and decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure are behind the polio outbreak in Gaza, calling for an immediate ceasefire in the besieged strip.
‘The resurgence of polio in Gaza is a consequence of the continuous destruction of the infrastructure and health system by Israeli forces,’ MSF said in a statement on Monday.
‘The war has destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure, forced people into unhygienic and appalling living conditions, and disrupted routine vaccinations – perfect conditions for diseases like polio to spread,’ it warned.
MSF described the vaccination campaign as a ‘positive step’, but stressed that ‘it is still a drop in the ocean compared to people’s critical medical humanitarian needs.’
They also called for ‘an immediate and sustained ceasefire to ensure people in Gaza have proper access to aid and health care.
‘The campaign and announcement of military pauses during the vaccination campaign should not divert attention from the relentless violence and its impact on the delivery of humanitarian aid,’ MSF said, noting that ‘fewer than half of the hospitals in Gaza (16 of 36) are operational while people’s medical needs are greater than ever.’
According to MSF, its teams are providing logistical and organisational support for Gaza’s Health Ministry and United Nations’ vaccination campaign at five health facilities across Dayr al-Balah in central Gaza and Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
- The Iranian Foreign Minister has warned that the continuation of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is causing a ‘dangerous crisis’ in West Asia.
In an X post on Monday, Abbas Araqchi said Israel’s Western supporters must bear responsibility for their failure to end ‘criminal provocations’ by the occupying regime in the region.
‘By persisting in Gaza genocide and now dispatching its killing machine to the West Bank, Israel is pushing the region to the brink of a dangerous crisis,’ he said.
‘If Bibi’s Western enablers fail to curb these criminal provocations, they’ll share responsibility for the consequences – and be held accountable,’ he added, referring to Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s nickname.
So far, since the beginning of its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, the Tel Aviv regime has failed to achieve any of its declared objectives there, despite killing at least 40,786 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 94,224 others.
During the same period, the Israeli military also conducted bloody raids in the occupied West Bank and killed 670 Palestinians.
On August 28, the Israeli army launched a massive assault on the West Bank, deploying hundreds of troops and conducting airstrikes on the cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, which are major centres of Palestinian resistance against the occupying regime.
- Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi says the Islamic Republic supports any ceasefire deal agreed by the Palestinians and the resistance movement Hamas.
Araqchi made the remarks during a phone call with his Bulgarian counterpart Ivan Kondov on Sunday.
During the conversation, he pointed to the situation in Gaza and the Palestinians’ dire need for humanitarian aid, saying: ‘Iran supports any agreement accepted by Palestinians and Hamas (that aims) to achieve ceasefire and provide a ground for sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.’
This came as a new round of ceasefire talks, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the US, resumed recently.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Araqchi expressed Tehran’s keenness to enhance cooperation with Sofia, particularly in the economic field.
Kondov also voiced his country’s readiness to strengthen bilateral ties with Iran.
In their telephone conversation, the two ministers also discussed consular issues.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who emerged victorious in the second round of the presidential vote on July 5th, has stressed that the Islamic Republic’s principal policy is to foster peace and friendship, prevent tensions and interact with world countries.
