Polio Vaccines Arrive in Gaza, but Distributing Them Is the Next Challenge

More than 1.2 million doses of the polio vaccine arrived in Gaza on Monday, in preparation for an expansive effort to inoculate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said.

The vaccines landed after the first case of the disease in the territory in 25 years was confirmed earlier this month.

UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, said it was delivering the vaccines in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA; and other groups. UNRWA officials said they hoped to deliver the first vaccines to Gazan children starting on Saturday.

But the campaign will be “a very difficult operation and its success will depend very much on the conditions on the ground at the time,” Sam Rose, a senior official from the agency, said at a news briefing on Monday.

The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to begin the campaign to inoculate children under 10 were underway. It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to medical centers in Gaza, particularly after the U.N. said on Monday that its already hamstrung humanitarian operations had been brought to a temporary halt after the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Deir al-Balah, where the agency has its central operations.

But a senior U.N. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, said at a briefing on Monday that there was no change to plans to begin polio vaccinations, despite the fact that the temporary pause in the U.N.’s humanitarian mission.

Speaking from Zawaida, in central Gaza, Mr. Rose, of UNRWA, said that more than 3,000 people would be involved in the vaccination campaign, about a third of them from UNRWA. Mobile health teams would help deliver the vaccines to shelters, clinics and schools, but he said a humanitarian pause was needed for parents and children to safely meet aid workers at those sites.

Aid workers “will do our absolute utmost to deliver the campaign because, without it, we know that the conditions will just be worse someday,” Mr. Rose said. “It is not guaranteed that it will be a success.”

For children who contract polio, he added, the prospects of receiving proper treatment remain “incredibly bad” while many of Gaza’s hospitals and health clinics are closed or only partly functioning as a result of the conflict.

The W.H.O. chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement on Thursday that a 10-month-old child in Gaza had contracted polio and had become paralyzed in one leg. The virus was found last month in wastewater samples, but this was the first confirmed case in Gaza in a quarter-century.

At least 95 percent of children in Gaza will need to receive both doses of the vaccine to prevent the spread of the disease and reduce the risk of its re-emergence, according to UNICEF, “given the severely disrupted health, water and sanitation systems in the Gaza Strip.”

UNICEF and the W.H.O. have called on “all parties” in the conflict to put in place a weeklong humanitarian pause in Gaza to allow both rounds of vaccines to be delivered, saying that “without the humanitarian pauses, the delivery of the campaign will not be possible.”

COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry’s agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, said in a statement on Monday that the vaccines had been delivered to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel. The agency added that the campaign would be conducted in coordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses” that it observes, which, it said, would allow Palestinians to reach vaccination centers.

In June, Israel announced that it would observe partial daily suspensions of its military activity in some areas of Gaza, calling them humanitarian pauses, saying they were aimed at making it safer for groups to deliver aid in the territory.

The Gazan Health Ministry has warned that inoculations alone will not be effective amid a lack of clean water and personal hygiene supplies in Gaza, as well as issues with sewage and waste collection in overcrowded areas where displaced families were sheltering. It said medical teams would have to spread out across the territory, “which requires an urgent cease-fire.”

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Anushka Patil and Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.