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 childrenbeing 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 incentiveto 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.
Yard sign design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press.