The uphill battle against polio in the Gaza Strip
A campaign to administer oral polio vaccines to 640,000 Palestinian children under 10 years old got underway this past weekend with almost 87,000 children being given the vaccine during its first day. The campaign, organized by the Gaza Ministry of Health, WHO, UNICEF and UNRWA, involves thousands of health and community outreach workers working in mobile teams and at hundreds of fixed locations, starting in central Gaza, and then moving south and finally to the north. Israel agreed to enforce ‘humanitarian pauses’ between 6 AM to 3 pm for three – possibly four - days to enable families to travel to the sites where the vaccinations are being administered. To be fully protected, children will need a booster vaccine in a month’s time.
Before October 2023, 99 percent of Gaza’s children had been vaccinated against polio. In July 2024, Type 2 polio virus was found in six samples of wastewater from Khan Younis and Deir al Balah. Gaza’s first polio case in 25 years emerged in Deir al Balah a month later. Eleven-month-old Abdul Rahman Abu al-Jidyan is now partially paralyzed. By late August, there were two additional reports of children suffering from acute flaccid paralysis, a symptom of polio.
While Israel has long delayed the entry of convoys of humanitarian aid into Gaza, it has facilitated the entry of the refrigerated trucks carrying 1.26 million doses of the vaccine. The fact that in Israel there are approximately 175,000 children of ultra-Orthodox families who have not been vaccinated has given it an incentive to cooperate with the effort to stop the spread of this highly infectious disease. The ultra-Orthodox, some 17 percent of Israel’s population, are an important constituency of Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Will the campaign be successful in stopping a full-blown epidemic from emerging? The signs are hardly promising. Gaza’s water and sewage infrastructure has been largely destroyed or severely damaged and two-thirds of its population are now suffering from water-borne diseases.
The polio virus is spread by contaminated water and fecal matter, and in Gaza, raw sewage flows in the streets and between tents in encampments, and 395,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated near heavily populated areas. In addition, Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are being constantly displaced – they were ordered by Israel to evacuate 16 times in August alone – and crammed into smaller and smaller areas lacking access to clean water and sanitation facilities.
To make matters even worse, there is no permanent ceasefire in sight, and the carnage caused by Israel’s military onslaught is unrelenting and indiscriminate. Humanitarian workers continue to be targets. On August 29, two days after the Israeli army fired at a World Food Programme truck bearing UN insignia near a checkpoint, five people were killed in an airstrike on a convoy carrying medical supplies organized by the US charity ANERA. In both cases, the army had given ‘de-confliction’ clearance to the aid vehicles.
To Sacrifice or Free the Hostages? Israeli Protesters Have Chosen a Side
“For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mass protests that erupted across Israel on Sunday were all about overthrowing him and his government. Certainly, this goal was stated explicitly by almost every speaker who took to the stage at the main protest in Tel Aviv — where reportedly more than 300,000 Israelis flooded the streets after the army’s recovery of the bodies of six more hostages from Gaza, who had been executed shortly beforehand. Einav Zangauker, the mother of the hostage Matan, captured the mood of much of the public when she ordained Netanyahu with a new nickname: “The executioner.”
But the protests, which have continued into the week, also had a deeper, more subversive message that Netanyahu probably understood too. Without any of the speakers explicitly saying as much, Sunday’s demonstrations were for an end to the war.”
Read the article from +972 here.
Israelis protest for the release of hostages outside the Prime Minister's official residence in Jerusalem, September 2, 2024. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)
Truth
Gaza Humanitarian Response Update | 19 August - 1 September 2024
Health
Response
During the reporting period, 52 Health Cluster partners were active in Gaza, with 27 reporting on their response activities. As of 1 September, there were 15 Emergency Medical Teams (EMTs) supporting the local healthcare workforce, including three in northern Gaza.
The first round of the polio vaccination campaign commenced in central Gaza on 1 September, aiming to immunize 156,583 children under the age of 10 in the area. A total of 510 teams have been deployed across central Gaza to facilitate the vaccination effort. During the first day, a total of 86,683 children were vaccinated. The campaign will be undertaken in phases, focusing on one zone at a time - starting in central Gaza, before shifting to the south, and finally to the northern governorates. The campaign will last three consecutive days in each zone and will be extended by a fourth day if needed. Round two of the campaign will aim to administer the second dose of the vaccine in four weeks’ time. The overall objective is to reach over 640,000 children under 10 across the Gaza Strip in each of the two rounds. In total, 40 Health partners are participating in this joint endeavor; 17 of them operate health service points where vaccinations are being administered, while another 23 are involved in outreach efforts to inform communities about the campaign.
The restoration of health services continues at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, with the emergency and outpatient departments and two operating theatres having now resumed functionality. An EMT will also be deployed to the facility in the upcoming weeks.
At the Al Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, the new emergency department and the hemodialysis unit are currently operational.
A hemodialysis unit comprising 18 dialysis machines has been established at the new Az Zawaida Field Hospital in Deir al Balah, which was hastily opened by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), jointly with the Ministry of Health (MoH), in late August, to provide urgent care to patients who fled from the Al Aqsa Hospital.
Challenges
Health partners continue to face challenges in accessing health facilities in northern Gaza, which are now at risk of becoming non-functional due to severe fuel and supply shortages.
Persistent obstacles hampering the entry of humanitarian trucks through the Kerem Shalom Crossing are causing shortages of medical supplies throughout the Gaza Strip.
The lack of a systematic mechanism for the medical evacuation of critically ill and injured patients out of Gaza means that the waiting list of patients keeps growing while the clinical conditions of many of them continue to deteriorate.
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An OCHA staff member dispatching polio vaccines in Deir al Balah area of the Gaza Strip. Photo by OCHA/Themba Linden, 2 September 2024
