WHO says its deal with Israel will allow limited pauses in Gaza fighting for polio vaccinations

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. World Health Organization said Thursday that it has reached an agreement with Israel for limited pauses in fighting in Gaza to allow for polio vaccinations for hundreds of thousands of children after a baby contracted the first confirmed case in 25 years in the Palestinian territory.

The vaccination campaign will start Sunday in central Gaza, with a “humanitarian pause” lasting from 6 a.m. until 3 p.m. for three days that can be extended by an additional day if needed, said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories.

The effort — which has been coordinated with Israeli authorities — will then move to southern Gaza and finally northern Gaza for similar pauses, he told a U.N. press conference by video from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.

“I’m not going to say this is the ideal way forward. But this is a workable way forward,” Peeperkorn said.

The vaccination campaign is targeting 640,000 children under 10, who will each receive two drops of oral polio vaccine in two rounds — the second to be given four weeks after the first.

Peeperkorn said the humanitarian pauses are critical so families can bring their children to get vaccinated and get back to where they are staying by 3 p.m.

“We have an agreement on that, so we expect that all parties will stick to that,” he said.

WHO said health workers need to vaccinate at least 90% of children in Gaza to stop the transmission of polio. The campaign will involve more than 2,100 health workers from U.N. agencies and the Gaza Ministry of Health, working at hundreds of sites across Gaza and with mobile teams.

The humanitarian pauses are not a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that mediators U.S., Egypt and Qatar have long been seeking, including in talks that are ongoing this week.

Hamas is “ready to cooperate with international organizations to secure this campaign,” according to a statement from Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ political bureau.

An Israeli official said before the plan was announced that there was expected to be some sort of tactical pause to allow vaccinations to take place. The official had spoken on condition of anonymity before the plan was finalized.

Israel didn’t immediately comment Thursday. The Israeli army has previously announced limited pauses in limited areas to allow international humanitarian operations.

Robert Wood, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., urged Israel to avoid further civilian evacuation orders during the pauses and said workers need security to vaccinate children.

“It is especially important for Israel to facilitate access for agencies carrying out the vaccination campaign and for it to ensure periods of calm and refrain from military operations during vaccination campaign periods,” he said.

The campaign comes after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste, scientists say. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza.

He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decadeslong effort by the WHO and partners to wipe out the disease. Health care workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis unleashed by Israel’s offensive grows.

Displaced Palestinians often live in crowded tent camps, near heaps of garbage and dirty wastewater flowing into the streets that aid workers describe as breeding grounds for diseases like polio, spread through fecal matter.

The polio strain that the 10-month-old contracted evolved from a weakened virus that was originally part of an oral vaccine but had been removed from the vaccine in 2016 in hopes of preventing vaccine-derived outbreaks. Public health authorities knew that decision would leave people unprotected against that particular strain, with scientists saying the case is the result of “an unqualified failure” of public health policy.

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AP writers Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed.