Middle East: Israel, Hamas back zoned pauses for polio vaccines after first case detected in 25 years

The Israeli military and Palestinian militant group Hamas have agreed to three separate, zoned three-day pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip to allow for the vaccination of 640,000 children against polio, the World Health Organisation says.

The vaccination campaign is due to start on Sunday, WHO senior official for the Palestinian territories Rik Peeperkorn said.

He said the agreement was for the pauses to take place between 6am and 3pm.

He said the campaign would start in central Gaza with a three-day pause in fighting, then move to southern Gaza, where there would be another three-day pause, followed by northern Gaza.

Peeperkorn added that there was an agreement to extend the humanitarian pause in each zone to a fourth day if needed.

These humanitarian pauses are not a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that mediators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar have long been seeking, including in talks that are ongoing this week.

The WHO confirmed on August 23 that the type 2 poliovirus has paralysed at least one baby, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.

The baby in Gaza was infected with a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste, according to scientists.

The infection paralysed the lower part of one leg in the unvaccinated 10-month-old child.

The baby boy was one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

The United Nations Security Council will meet later on Thursday regarding the enclave’s humanitarian situation.

“We are ready to co-operate with international organisations to secure this campaign, serving and protecting more than 650,000 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas official Basem Naim told Reuters.

The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit (COGAT) said on Wednesday that the vaccination campaign would be conducted in coordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses that will allow the population to reach the medical centres where the vaccinations will be administered”.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7 when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has since killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.

with AP