Polio vaccines arrived in Gaza on Monday, kicking off an expansive effort to vaccinate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said, after the first confirmed case of the disease in the territory in 25 years.
The U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, said it was bringing in 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine for children in Gaza in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, and other groups.
The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed on Monday that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to launch the vaccination campaign for children under 10 were underway. It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to vaccination centers in Gaza, particularly after the U.N. said on Monday that Israeli evacuation orders had brought its already hamstrung humanitarian operations to a halt.
UNRWA officials are hoping to deliver the first vaccines to children in Gaza starting 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, told reporters at a news briefing on Monday.
Speaking from Zawaida, in central Gaza, Mr. Rose said that more than 3,000 people would be involved in the vaccination campaign, about a third of them from UNRWA. Mobile health teams would help deliver the vaccines to shelters, clinics and schools, but a humanitarian pause was needed for parents and children to safely meet aid workers at those sites, he said.
Aid workers “will do our absolute utmost to deliver the campaign, because without it, we know that the conditions will just be worse someday,” Mr. Rose said. “But yeah, it is not guaranteed that it will be a success.”