WHO: Three-Day Pause in Gaza War for Polio Vaccination

By Staff, Agencies

Senior UN World Health Organization official, Rik Peeperkorn confirmed that the “Israeli” entity and the Palestinian Resistance Hamas movement have agreed to three-day pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip to allow for the vaccination of some 640000 children against polio.

The WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories, said the so-called “humanitarian pauses” will start Sunday in central Gaza and last just eight or nine hours each day for three days.

That will be followed by another similar pause in southern Gaza and then another in northern Gaza.

Noting that the campaign aims to vaccinate 640,000 children under 10, Peeperkorn told reporters via video conference that health workers -more than 2,000 from UN agencies and Gaza’s Health Ministry- might need additional days to complete the vaccinations.

“We need this humanitarian pause,” he said, adding “And that has been very clear. We have an agreement on that, so we expect that all parties will stick to that.”

The WHO stressed that at least 90% of children in Gaza should be vaccinated to stop the transmission of polio.

“I’m not going to say this is the ideal way forward. But this is a workable way forward,” Peeperkorn said of the humanitarian pauses.

 “It will happen and should happen because we have an agreement,” he later added.

The agreement came after a 10-month-old baby was partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste.

Meanwhile, Hamas emphasized that it’s “ready to cooperate with international organizations to secure this campaign,” according to a statement from Basem Naim, a member of the resistance movement’s political bureau.