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.

Read the entire report

An OCHA staff member dispatching polio vaccines in Deir al Balah area of the Gaza Strip. Photo by OCHA/Themba Linden, 2 September 2024

Water Fact:  September 3, 2024

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.

Children are drinking from puddles and wading through sewage pools, as Israel pummels water systems in Gaz

There have been many water facilities damaged or destroyed by Israel’s 10-month-long assault in Gaza, according to the UN and various other international bodies, compounding the civilian population’s suffering, risking the spread of disease and leading human rights experts to accuse Israel of using water supply as a weapon.

The destruction of the Canada Water reservoir “is certainly a breach of international humanitarian law (IHL),” Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, a Swiss institute specializing in hydro-diplomacy, told CNN.

Read the whole article here.

Global surge of water-related violence led by Israeli attacks on Palestinian supplies – report

Israeli attacks on Palestinian water supplies in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip accounted for a quarter of all water-related violence in 2023, as armed conflicts over dwindling resources surged globally, according to new research.

…“There was a massive uptick in violence over water in 2023, widely around the world, but especially in the Middle East.”

Water conflicts in the Middle East accounted for 38% of last year’s total, driven in large part by attacks on Palestinian water supplies and infrastructure in the occupied territories, according to the tracker, which monitors news reports, eyewitness accounts, UN reports and other conflict databases.

Israeli settlers and/or armed forces contaminated and destroyed water wells, pumps and irrigation systems on 90 occasions during 2023 – the equivalent of more than seven water-related acts of violence every month.

In Gaza, the water situation was already dire before Israel launched its war in retaliation for the deadly attack by Hamas on 7 October, after which much of the water and wastewater infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed, damaged or left unusable.

Read the article here.