A Palestinian child is vaccinated against polio during the second round of a vaccination campaign, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on October 14, 2024. File photograph
| Photo Credit: Ramadan Abed

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday, October 15, 2024 that it had been able to start its polio campaign in central Gaza and vaccinate tens of thousands of children despite Israeli strikes in the designated protected zone hours before.

As part of an agreement between the Israeli military and Palestinian militant group Hamas, humanitarian pauses in the year-long Gaza war had been due to begin early on Monday to reach hundreds of thousands of children.

However, hours before then, the U.N. humanitarian office said Israeli forces struck tents near al Aqsa hospital, inside the zone, where it said four people were burned to death.

The U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said one of its schools in the central Gazan city of Nuseirat, intended as a vaccination site, was hit overnight between Sunday and Monday, killing up to 22 people.

WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević told a Geneva press briefing that over 92,000 children, or around half of the children targeted for polio vaccines in the central area, had been inoculated on Monday.

“What we have received from colleagues is that the vaccination went without a major issue yesterday, and we hope It will continue the same way,” he said.

Other humanitarian agencies have previously voiced concerns about the viability of the polio campaign in northern Gaza, where an Israeli offensive is under way.

Aid groups carried out an initial round of vaccinations last month, after a baby was partially paralysed by the type 2 polio virus in August, in the first such case in the territory in 25 years.

In a year of war between Israel and Hamas, the people of Gaza have lost nearly everything: their loved ones, their homes, their careers and their dreams.

AFP spoke to a student, a paramedic and a former civil servant in Gaza, to hear how the conflict has destroyed their lives.

The student stopped in his tracks

Fares al-Farra, 19, was as brilliant at school as he was ambitious.

Two months before October 7 last year, he graduated with top marks and enrolled in Gaza’s University College of Applied Sciences to study artificial intelligence and data science.

“I had many ambitions and goals, and I was always confident that one day I would achieve them,” he said.

Days after Hamas’s attack sparked the Gaza war, the Israeli military bombed part of the university.

Mr. Farra and his family fled their home in the southern city of Khan Yunis as it became a battleground, forcing them to shelter for months in a makeshift camp.

They returned home when Israeli troops withdrew from the area, only for it to then be bombed, demolishing the walls, breaking Farra’s arm and killing his close friend Abu Hassan.

“He always took care of me,” Mr. Farra said of his friend, who experienced with him forced displacement. “He was a good person.”

The hardship of war has chipped away at Farra’s optimism and his hopes for an education.

“It feels like all paths are closed,” he said.

He fears his dreams will no longer be a priority once the war ends.

“There will be more basic needs” to fulfil, he said.

Still, he said he longs for an end to the conflict, and that he can “achieve (his) dreams and goals”.

Paramedic and mother

Maha Wafi, 43, said she “really, really loves” her job as a paramedic in Khan Yunis, because she finds meaning in being able to help others.

“We go to the people to tell them: ‘we hear you’,” she said.

She also loved her life with Anis, her husband of 24 years, their five children and their beautiful house.

But the war forced her family to flee their home and seek shelter in a camp, just as the flow of wounded and sick increased due to the relentless bombardment, piling pressure on Gaza’s poorly equipped medical workers.

Then, in early December, Wafi’s husband was arrested. She has not seen him since.

She worries for her partner, but she must face the hardships of war alone. She takes care of their five children while continuing to work as a paramedic.

“You’re living in a tent… you have to bring water, fetch gas, light a fire and deal with the hardships of everything,” she said.

“All of this is psychological pressure on a working woman,” Wafi said, sitting by her ambulance, before scrubbing blood from its floor.

During the war, she has seen people killed and maimed. She narrowly escaped death when a strike hit a vehicle right next to her ambulance.

All she longs for now, she said, is for her husband to be released, and for life to go back to the way it was before the war.

“I don’t want anything more than how it was before October 7,” she said.

The civil servant turned beggar

Until October 7, Maher Zino, 39, lived a life of “beautiful routine” as a government employee earning what he described as a decent wage.

Together with his wife Fatima, they were raising their three children in Gaza City.

A year on, they have been displaced “so many times that it’s hard for me to count”, he said from his shelter in an olive grove in central Gaza.

Moving from Gaza City to Khan Yunis in the south, to Rafah by the Egyptian border, and then back to central Gaza, the family had to start from scratch each time.

“Set up a tent, build a bathroom, buy basic furniture, and find clothes because you’ve left everything behind,” he said.

Sometimes, they were able to find cover before nightfall.

Others, they’ve had to sleep on the street, said Mr. Zino, who said he’d “never needed anyone” before the war.

In the shelter they now live in, Mr. Zino and his wife have managed to create a semblance of domestic life with a place to sleep, a water tank and a makeshift toilet.

He, too, said he wished things could go back to the way they were before.

“I became a beggar,” he said, pleading for blankets to keep his family warm and searching “for charity kitchens to give me a plate of food just to feed my children”.

“That’s what the war did to us,” he said.

A health official said a polio vaccination campaign began in Gaza on Saturday, while an aid worker said a large-scale rollout would begin on Sunday, coinciding with a “humanitarian pause” agreed by Israel and Hamas.

The vaccination drive was announced after Gaza recorded its first polio case in a quarter of a century earlier this month.

Local health officials along with the UN and NGOs “are starting today the polio vaccination campaign”, Moussa Abed, director of primary health care at the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, told AFP on Saturday.

An unspecified number of children received the first dose of the vaccination, which involves two doses and is administered orally, at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis.

Among them was Amal Shaheen’s three-year-old daughter, who was already in the hospital being treated for pneumonia.

“We have been in the hospital for 17 days… I spend all my days worrying about her,” Shaheen said.

“Today she was vaccinated against polio to protect her, like all the children in the hospital have been vaccinated.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that Israel had agreed to a series of three-day “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza to facilitate vaccinations, though officials had earlier said the campaign was expected to start on Sunday.

‘Not a ceasefire’

An international aid worker told AFP that Palestinian authorities had organised a launch event on Saturday and that the vaccination campaign was still expected to begin in full on Sunday.

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body which oversees civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, said on Saturday that vaccines would be given daily from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) until 2:00 pm for three days in central Gaza, three days in southern Gaza and three days in northern Gaza.

“At the end of each regional vaccination campaign, a situational assessment will be conducted for the area,” it said.

The Palestinian health ministry distributed a slightly different schedule, with the vaccine programme lasting four days in each location.

The ministry identified 67 vaccination centres — mostly hospitals, smaller health centres and schools — in central Gaza, 59 in southern Gaza and 33 in northern Gaza.

Poliovirus is highly infectious and most often spread through sewage and contaminated water — an increasingly common problem in Gaza as the Israel-Hamas war drags on.

The media office of the Hamas-run government in Gaza said on Saturday that the vaccination campaign required an “immediate ceasefire”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said measures to facilitate polio vaccination in Gaza are “not a ceasefire”.

The campaign aims to cover more than 640,000 children under 10 years old.

Michael Ryan, WHO deputy director-general, told the UN Security Council this week that 1.26 million doses of the oral vaccine had been delivered in Gaza, with another 400,000 still to arrive

The Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry said earlier this month that tests in Jordan had confirmed polio in an unvaccinated 10-month-old baby from central Gaza.

Poliovirus is highly infectious and most often spread through sewage and contaminated water — an increasingly common problem in Gaza as the Israel-Hamas war drags on.

The disease mainly affects children under the age of five. It can cause deformities and paralysis and is potentially fatal.

‘100 per cent safe’

Bakr Deeb told AFP on Saturday that he brought his three children — all under 10 — to a vaccination point on Saturday despite some initial doubts about its safety.

“I was hesitant at first and very afraid of the safety of this vaccination,” he said.

“After the assurances of its safety, and with all the families going to the vaccination points, I decided to go with my children as well, to protect them.”

Abed, the health official, stressed on Saturday that the vaccine was “100 percent safe”.

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7 which resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 40,691 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.

Incessant Israeli bombardment has also caused a major humanitarian crisis and devastated the health system.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

In Gaza, a mother worries that her month-old son, Mohammed, could be infected with polio after the Palestinian health ministry confirmed the first case in the enclave on Friday, ending a 25 year period in which the Strip was polio-free.

Just three days after his birth, Ghada al-Ghandour’s son Mohammed started developing skin rashes.

“He had skin rashes as if he was burnt,” she said.

A doctor told her there were no creams to treat her child.

She later brought him to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza to seek a diagnosis and treatment.

The rash fueled his mother’s fears that other symptoms and diseases could follow due to a lack of hygiene and medical supplies in Gaza after more than 10 months of conflict.

In a statement, the Palestinian health ministry confirmed the first case of polio in the city of Deir al-Balah had been detected in a 10-month-old baby who had not been vaccinated.

Likewise, Mohammed has not received a polio vaccine.

“My son was deprived of the first vaccine in his first month,” his mother said.

Polio was detected in sewage in Gaza’s Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis governorates, Dr. Hamid Jafari, a polio specialist at the World Health Organization (WHO), said on Aug. 7, adding it was possible the virus had been circulating since September.

‘YET ANOTHER THREAT TO CHILDREN’

Poliomyelitis, which is spread mainly through the fecal-oral route, is a highly infectious virus that can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis.

Children under 5 are most at risk from the viral disease, and especially infants under 2 since normal vaccination regimens have been disrupted by the war.

“If the occupation (Israeli forces) continues to close the (border) crossing and denies access to vaccines, it will lead to a health disaster,” said Khalil al-Daqran, spokesperson of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Israel announced on Sunday that it would facilitate the transfer into Gaza of polio vaccines for around one million children.

More than 43,000 vials of the vaccine were expected to arrive in Israel in the coming weeks and would be sent to Gaza, according to a statement from COGAT, the Israeli defence agency that coordinated civilian matters with the Palestinians. This would be enough for two rounds of doses for over a million children, it said.

But Al-Daqran of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said a vaccination campaign could not happen without a pause in fighting.

The reemergence of polio “represents yet another threat to the children in the Gaza Strip and neighbouring countries,” the WHO said on Aug. 16.

Nearly half of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are under the age of 18 and around 15% are children under the age of 5, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Aside from the resurgence of polio and the threat of other diseases, Palestinians face a humanitarian crisis with shortages of food, fuel and water inflicting suffering every day.

The war in Gaza started after Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostage, according to Israeli tallies. The death count of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military campaign has exceeded 40,000, according to Gaza authorities.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)