WHO says Gaza children need peace more than vaccines

The UN 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 is 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.

Thursday’s announcement came after a 10-month-old baby was partia llyparalyzed 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 7, was one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the war.

UNRWA: Ceasefire needed now

On Monday, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said 87,000 Gazan children had received the first dose of a polio vaccine as the inoculation drive continues 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.

Unvaccinated Israeli ultra-Orthodox

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 realize 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.”

WHO announces three-day pause in Gaza war for polio vaccination

The UN World Health Organization says Israel has agreed to limited pauses in its strikes on Gaza to allow health workers to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children.

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.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 40,786 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 94,224 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

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