Israel agrees to pauses in fighting for polio vaccine drive

Israel has agreed to a series of “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza to allow for the vaccination of children against polio, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said, reports BBC.

The campaign will aim to vaccinate around 640,000 children across the Gaza strip and will begin on Sunday, senior WHO official Rik Peeperkorn said.

It will be rolled out in three separate stages, across the central, southern and northern parts of the strip. During each stage, fighting will pause for three consecutive days between 06:00 and 15:00 local time.

The agreement comes days after UN officials said a 10-month-old baby had been partially paralysed after contracting Gaza’s first case of polio for 25 years.

Around 1.26m doses of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) are already in Gaza, with 400,000 additional doses set to arrive soon.

The campaign will be administered by "the Palestinian Ministry of Health, in collaboration with WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA". Over 2,000 health and community outreach workers have been trained to administer the vaccine.

The WHO is aiming to achieve 90% vaccine coverage across the strip, which is needed to stop transmission of the virus within Gaza.

An agreement is in place for an additional fourth day of vaccination and humanitarian pause if needed to achieve that level of vaccination.

Poliovirus is highly infectious and is most often spread through sewage and contaminated water.

It can cause disfigurement and paralysis, and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.

The WHO says immunisation rates in Gaza and the occupied West Bank were optimal before the conflict. Polio vaccine coverage was estimated at 99% in 2022, although it had declined to 89% last year, according to the latest data.

More than 40,530 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry._Agencies.