GAZA – The first full day of a campaign to vaccinate 640,000 children against polio in Gaza has been successful, the UN says. The rollout relies on a series of localised pauses in fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters, and the first three-day window began on Sunday.

To be effective, the World Health Organization WHO says at least 90% of children under 10 must be immunised in a short time frame. The drive follows the On Thursday, the WHO announced an agreement with Israel for limited pauses in the fighting to allow the polio vaccination programme to take place.

Around 1.3 million doses of the vaccine were recently brought in through the Kerem Shalom checkpoint by Unicef. The agency has had to keep them in cold storage in its warehouse at the correct temperature to maintain their potency. Another shipment of 400,000 doses is set to be delivered to Gaza soon. On Sunday, Palestinians were able to take their children to three health centres in central Gaza in the first phase of the campaign, which will later extend to the north and the south.

Each “humanitarian pause” is set to last from 06:00 until 15:00 local time over three days, with the possibility of adding an extra day if needed. This is a huge endeavour”, Crickx adds. “Especially in a place like the Gaza Strip where we know that, for example, roads have been damaged, that access is problematic, that security incidents take place on a daily basis.”

One doctor involved in the operation, Mohammed Salha, told the BBC that one of the main challenges facing the drive was the lack of fuel needed to keep hospitals running and for the cold chain storage of the vaccines.

He said he also worried people would be “scared to move from shelters to hospitals or healthcare centres” even with the agreement of a humanitarian pause in place.

 (BBC) …[+]