Geneva, September 2 (RHC)-- 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.
“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.”
“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.
