Israel has agreed to temporarily halt some military operations in the Gaza Strip to allow for a polio vaccination campaign, The Washington Post reported Wednesday night, quoting a senior State Department official.
The decision reportedly comes after Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue during their meeting last week.
Last week, several Israeli infectious disease organizations jointly called on the country’s health and defense ministers to order an immediate pause in Gaza. Their aim was to enable a widespread vaccination drive to combat the rapidly spreading poliovirus in the territory.
The medical associations warned that the polio outbreak in Gaza poses a risk to Israeli soldiers in the strip, those dealing with imprisoned Palestinian terrorists and the hostages, including unvaccinated infant Kfir Bibas.
In response, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement clarifying that Israel had not agreed to “pauses in fighting for polio vaccinations” but rather to “designating specific areas in the Gaza Strip” for unspecified purposes. This careful wording likely aimed to avoid suggesting a humanitarian pause in the absence of a ceasefire agreement, which some members of Netanyahu’s coalition oppose.
The Israeli government has facilitated the transfer of close to 300,000 doses of polio vaccine into Gaza since Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the western Negev, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson announced last 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.
“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.
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.
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.
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
