Gaza: Pauses in Fighting for 640,000 Palestinian Children to Receive Polio Vaccine

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Amid limited pauses in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas, the United Nations and World Health Organization have launched a three-day campaign to inoculate 640,000 Palestinian children under the age of 10 in Gaza against polio, the Associated Press reports.

The campaign follows the discovery that a 10-month-old baby is paralyzed in the leg after contracting the first reported case of polio in Gaza in 25 years.

The vaccination campaign was launched on Sunday, September 1, after the WHO announced Thursday that Israel has agreed to a “humanitarian pause” for the vaccinations to take place, AP reports. The pause is to last three days, with the possibility of adding an extra day as needed: with much of Gaza now under rubble, after Hamas triggered the current war with its October 7 attack on Israel, the logistics of vaccinating hundreds of thousands of children are challenging.

The campaign will begin in central Gaza and, through coordination with Israeli forces, will move to southern Gaza and northern Gaza during similar pauses, AP reports.

Each child will be given two drops of oral polio vaccine in two rounds, the second to be administered four weeks after the first, AP said. Around 1.3 million doses have been delivered so far, and 400,000 additional doses are expected to arrive soon.The vaccines will be trucked to distribution sites by more than 2,000 medical volunteers.

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