Humanitarian Situation Update #219 West Bank

Key Highlights

  • Eleven Palestinians, including a woman and a child, were killed by Israeli forces during a two-day operation in Tulkarm and Tubas, between 10 and 12 September; eight of them were hit by airstrikes.

  • At least 82 Palestinian households, comprising 360 people, including 161 children and 177 women, remain displaced after the two-day operation in Tulkarm and Tubas, where about 660 housing units were damaged, with 58 rendered uninhabitable.

  • The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favour of a settler organization, placing a Palestinian family of 16 people at imminent risk of displacement from their home in Batn al Hawa, Silwan, East Jerusalem; four households, comprising 18 people, were forcibly evicted last month following a ruling in favour of the same organization.

  • Amid ongoing settler violence, the single remaining resident in the Palestinian community of Ein al Hilwa – Um al Jmal (Tubas) was forced to displace; he is among 1,628 Palestinians displaced since 7 October 2023 in the context of incidents involving Israeli settlers.

  • The West Bank school year faces major challenges: 782,000 students are affected by movement restrictions and settler violence, 58 schools are at risk of demolition; Israeli settlers attacked pupils and staff of Al Mu'arrajat East Elementary School, injuring nine.

Latest Developments (after 16 September)

  • On 18 September, initial reports indicate that Israeli forces killed and withheld the body of a 17-year-old Palestinian child at Ni’lin checkpoint (Ramallah).

  • On 17 September, initial reports indicate that Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man while attempting to cross the West Bank Barrier in Tulkarm.

READ THE REPORT HERE.

A displaced Palestinian family sitting amid the rubble of their destroyed home in Tulkarm refugee camp, following an Israeli operation. Photo by OCHA, 7 September 2024.

Water Fact:  September 13, 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 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)