Polio vaccine campaign begins in Gaza as strikes continue and West Bank remains on edge

Jerusalem: A campaign to inoculate children in Gaza against polio and prevent the spread of the virus began on Saturday as Palestinians in both the Hamas-governed coastal enclave and in the occupied West Bank reeled from Israel’s ongoing campaigns in both regions.

Children in Gaza began receiving vaccines on Saturday, the Strip’s health ministry announced in a news conference, a day before the large-scale rollout and planned pause in fighting agreed to by Israel and the United Nations World Health Organisation.

Associated Press reporters saw roughly ten infants receiving doses of vaccine in the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis on Saturday afternoon.

Hours earlier, Gaza’s Health Ministry said hospitals received 89 dead on Saturday, including 26 who died in an overnight Israeli bombardment, and 205 wounded — one of the highest daily tallies in months.

Meanwhile, parts of the West Bank remained on edge Saturday as Israel’s military continued its largescale military campaign, the deadliest since the Israel-Hamas war began, and two car bombings by Palestinian militants near Israeli settlements left three soldiers injured.

Two car bombs exploded early Saturday in Gush Etzion, a bloc of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel’s military killed both Palestinian attackers after the bombs exploded in a compound in Karmei Zur and at a gas station, Israel’s military said. Three Israeli soldiers sustained minor injuries.

Palestinian health officials said Israel was holding the bodies of the attackers, naming the men as Muhammad Marqa and Zoodhi Afifeh.

Hamas did not claim the men as its fighters but called the attack a “heroic operation” and a “new slap to the occupation’s security system” in a statement early Saturday. The Palestinian militant group said earlier this month after a bombing attack in Tel Aviv that it would continue such attacks.

The bombings took place as Israel continued its largescale raid — which includes destruction of infrastructure, airstrikes and gunbattles — into urban refugee camps in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, in the north of the volatile West Bank. About 20 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s incursion started Tuesday, causing alarm among the international community that the war might widen beyond the Gaza Strip.

Israel has described the operation as a strategy to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians, which since the start of the war have increased in the West Bank, including near settlements that the international community largely considers illegal. In return, the Palestinian Health Ministry noted a surge in Palestinian deaths by Israeli forces, with 663 killed in the West Bank in the nearly 11 months since the war began.

In central Gaza, Israeli airstrikes hit a multi-story building housing displaced people in and around Nuseirat, a built-up refugee camp in central Gaza, further south in Khan Younis and northward in Gaza City, officials at hospitals in the three areas said on Saturday morning.

Among the dead were a physician and his family and a child whose right leg had been previously amputated, according to an initial list of casualties from the hospital and footage released on Saturday by civil defense officials who operated under Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

Israel is expected to pause some of its operations in Gaza on Sunday to allow health workers to roll out their campaign to administer polio vaccines to some 650,000 Palestinian children, the UN World Health Organisation said earlier this week.

Officials said the pause would last at least nine hours and is a byproduct of an agreement with WHO, and unrelated to ongoing cease-fire negotiations between Israel, Hamas and regional mediators.

The vaccination campaign comes after a case was discovered earlier this month for the first time in 25 years after doctors concluded a 10-month-old had been partially paralysed by a mutated strain of the polio virus after not being vaccinated due to the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Healthcare workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has deepened throughout the war which broke out after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and abducting around 250. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were militants.

The United States, Qatar and Egypt have spent months trying to mediate a cease-fire that would see the remaining hostages released. But the talks have repeatedly bogged down as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed “total victory” over Hamas and the militant group has demanded a lasting cease-fire and a full withdrawal from the territory.