The Israeli government has facilitated the transfer of close to 300,000 doses of polio vaccine into the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the western Negev, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson announced this week.
Over the past months, Jerusalem “has coordinated the entry of 282,126 vials of the polio vaccine, sufficient for 2,821,260 doses,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, the IDF’s international spokesman, tweeted on Sunday.
“Since the discovery of the virus [in Gaza] in July, and as part of the vaccination campaign, 9,000 vials were brought through the Kerem Shalom crossing, providing 90,000 additional doses of the vaccine,” the spokesman stated.
In the upcoming weeks, another 43,250 vials of vaccine, tailored to the virus samples discovered in Gaza’s sewage, are scheduled to arrive in Israel and will be delivered to the Strip, Shoshani stated. He said the additional doses will be sufficient to vaccinate over a million children.
“As part of the medical response provided by the State of Israel, COGAT maintains continuous contact and conducts situational assessments with all health system stakeholders and the international community for ongoing monitoring of the medical situation in Gaza,” said Shoshani.
The Israeli military is also holding meetings “to implement vaccinations among the population in Gaza” in cooperation with USAID, he stressed.
Polio is a highly infectious disease that is spread through fecal-oral contamination, sometimes by drinking water contaminated due to poor sanitation and sewage infrastructure. The virus invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis, sometimes in a matter of hours.
According to the most recent World Health Organization data, 86% of Palestinians in Gaza have been vaccinated against polio. No polio cases have been detected since the start of the war, the WHO said this month.
Last month, the IDF announced it was starting polio vaccinations for soldiers fighting in Gaza after the virus was found in sewage there.
In the Jewish state, some 98% of the population has received polio immunization. The virus reemerged in 2022 when a 4-year-old girl from Jerusalem was diagnosed with the virus after experiencing paralysis, followed by several outbreaks of the disease across the country.
