The humanitarian pauses are not a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that mediators US, Egypt and Qatar have long been seeking, including in talks that are ongoing this week.
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Hamas is “ready to cooperate with international organisations to secure this campaign,” according to a statement from Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ political bureau.
An Israeli official said before the plan was announced that there was expected to be some sort of tactical pause to allow vaccinations to take place. The official had spoken on condition of anonymity before the plan was finalised.
Israel didn’t immediately comment. The Israeli army has previously announced limited pauses in limited areas to allow international humanitarian operations.
Robert Wood, US deputy ambassador to the UN, urged Israel to avoid further civilian evacuation orders during the pauses and said workers need security to vaccinate children.
“It is especially important for Israel to facilitate access for agencies carrying out the vaccination campaign and for it to ensure periods of calm and refrain from military operations during vaccination campaign periods,” he said.
The campaign comes after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu el-Jedian in was partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste, scientists say. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before October 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza.
He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decadeslong effort by the WHO and partners to wipe out the disease. Health care workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis unleashed by Israel’s offensive grows.
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Displaced Palestinians often live in crowded tent camps, near heaps of garbage and dirty wastewater flowing into the streets that aid workers describe as breeding grounds for diseases like polio, spread through fecal matter. The virus was detected in the territory’s wastewater and three suspected cases have now been reported.
The polio strain that the baby contracted evolved from a weakened virus that was originally part of an oral vaccine but had been removed from the vaccine in 2016 in hopes of preventing vaccine-derived outbreaks. Public health authorities knew that decision would leave people unprotected against that particular strain, with scientists saying the case was the result of “an unqualified failure” of public health policy.
Meanwhile, also in Deir al Balah, Palestinian medics say that an Israeli airstrike that hit an apartment building killed nine members of the same family, including five infants and two women.
Members of the al-Taweel family lifted up the bodies of five dead babies wrapped in bloodstained shrouds, showing their pale grey faces to journalists gathered outside the hospital morgue.
“These are Israel’s goals!” shouted Osama al-Taweel, as he wept over his grandchildren’s swaddled remains. Medics at the al-Awda Hospital said that one of the women killed in the strike on the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp was pregnant, and her fetus was killed too.
AP
