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GENEVA: UN agencies on Friday called for two seven-day breaks in the fighting in Gaza to vaccinate more than 640,000 children against polio, which has been detected in the wastewater.
The UN’s health and children’s agencies said they had drawn up detailed plans to reach children across the besieged Palestinian territory, starting later this month.
But that would require pauses in the fighting between Israel and Hamas, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said.
They said they were planning two rounds of a vaccination campaign across the Gaza Strip, starting in late August, against type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2).
Last month, it was announced that type 2 poliovirus had been detected in environmental surveillance samples collected in Gaza on June 23.
“WHO and UNICEF request all parties to the conflict to implement humanitarian pauses in the Gaza Strip for seven days to allow for two rounds of vaccination campaigns to take place,” they said.
A WHO spokeswoman said they were asking for seven days during each round.
“These pauses in fighting would allow children and families to safely reach health facilities and community outreach workers to get to children who cannot access health facilities for polio vaccination,” the statement said.
“Without the humanitarian pauses, the delivery of the campaign will not be possible.”
“The Gaza Strip has been polio-free for the last 25 years,” said the WHO and UNICEF.
“Its re-emergence, which the humanitarian community has warned about for the last 10 months, represents yet another threat to the children in the Gaza Strip and neighboring countries.
“A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in the Gaza Strip and the region.”
During each round of the campaign, the health ministry in Gaza, alongside UN agencies, would provide “two drops of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) to more than 640,000 children under 10 years of age.”
More than 1.6 million doses of nOPV2 were expected to transit through Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport “by the end of August,” the statement added.
Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious. It can cause deformities and paralysis, and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.
Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel triggered the war that resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
On Thursday the toll from Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza passed 40,000, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant casualties.