In race against polio, Gaza begins vaccination drive

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Health workers on Sunday began a polio vaccination drive in the Gaza Strip aimed at preventing an outbreak of the quick-spreading disease — a daunting challenge in a besieged enclave shattered by 10 months of war and dependent on commitments by Israel and Hamas to abide by pledged “humanitarian pauses.”

Israel, facing international pressure to prevent a wider outbreak of the crippling disease, moved with relative speed to allow agencies of the United Nations, supported by local health officials, to tackle the crisis in Gaza, where it launched a war in response to a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.

Hamas and Israel agreed to the pauses in the fighting to allow the vaccinations to take place, but the campaign will be tricky to execute. With much of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, and some 90% of the enclave’s roughly 2 million residents having repeatedly fled Israeli bombardment, it may be impossible to ensure the immunization of all of the enclave’s estimated 640,000 children under age 10.

“This is a race against time,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the main U.N. agency in charge of aiding Palestinians, said in a post on the social platform X.

For families seeking to get their children vaccinated, the challenges are layered and fraught: Not only must they trust that the cessations in fighting will hold, but many will have to find transportation, navigate blocked and broken roads and expose themselves to danger and widespread lawlessness to reach vaccination sites.

The 2,100 people trained to conduct the vaccination drive will face risks, too, including anxieties over a history of deadly assaults on aid workers since the war began.

At a news briefing at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis on Saturday, Dr. Bassam Abu Hamad, a member of the polio campaign committee in Gaza, tried to encourage families to get their children vaccinated.

Acknowledging potential concerns some parents might have, he said that the vaccine “is safe and rarely has any side effects,” and urged mothers to “convince each other” to vaccinate their children.

Early indications suggested that Sunday’s vaccinations were carried out unimpeded. UNRWA, the main U.N. agency in charge of aiding Palestinians, said Sunday afternoon that the humanitarian pauses “were respected” in the areas where vaccinations were taking place.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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