Thousands Protest in Israel After Recovery of 6 Hostages Killed in Gaza

[Pelican Press 0]

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Thousands Protest in ******* After Recovery of 6 Hostages ******* in Gaza

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

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

Although the vaccination drive officially began early Sunday, Gazan health authorities gave some doses to children on Saturday at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, according to reports in ************ news media. Videos showed doctors and health workers squeezing droplets of the poliovirus vaccine into the mouths of children who were being treated at the hospital.

“I knew about this campaign by chance. I was frightened when I heard the word polio,” said Maysaa Abu Daqqa, a mother of a 9-year-old, Habib Nizam. Ms. Abu Daqqa was waiting in a patients’ room at Nasser Hospital. “When I saw other women accepting the vaccinations for their children, I was encouraged to follow them,” she said.

Both ****** and ******* agreed to the pauses in the fighting to allow the vaccinations to take place, but the campaign will be tricky to ********. With much of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, and some 90 percent of the enclave’s roughly two million residents having repeatedly fled ******** 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, the head of the main U.N. agency in charge of aiding Palestinians, said in

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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 the 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 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.

“At first, we were warned by some people that this would harm our children,” said Yousif al-Saqqa, a 31-year-old displaced father who first heard about the campaign on social media. But after listening to encouraging remarks by the ************ health minister in Ramallah, Mr. al-Saqqa took his 4-year-old daughter, Alaa, to receive it on Sunday, even though she was vaccinated at 2 months old, he said.

Sewage pooling in a street in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in July. Poliovirus, which is highly contagious, thrives in unsanitary conditions.Credit…Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press

Poliovirus, which is highly contagious, can cause paralysis and ****** in the unvaccinated. Largely eradicated around the world by decades of public health campaigns, it can thrive in unsanitary conditions and in places where vaccination rates are not high enough. Such rates in Gaza, which health officials have said were at about 99 percent as recently as 2022, have dropped significantly among ******* because of the war.

The vaccine drive will be conducted through staggered pauses of fighting in different regions of the Gaza Strip, a process that is intended to allow aid workers to try to vaccinate children at roughly 700 medical facilities, mobile clinics and shelters.

******* will “allow a humanitarian corridor” for vaccination personnel to travel and will establish “designated safe areas” for them to administer vaccines during certain hours, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of ******* said in a statement on Saturday.

“******* views with importance the prevention of a polio outbreak in the Gaza Strip, including for the purpose of preventing the spread of ********* in the region,” it said.

The campaign is expected to last for three days, with each humanitarian pause in place from early morning until midafternoon. There will be an option to extend the vaccine drive if necessary, and then local health officials will shift their focus to southern Gaza. The northern region of the enclave will be treated last, according to the staggered schedule announced by global health officials on Thursday.

Gazans received a text message from the health ministry on Saturday, announcing the beginning of the vaccination drive for children under 10 years old across different parts of the strip starting on Sunday.

The vaccination campaign kicked off in central Gaza, where the health ministry said clinics, hospitals and U.N. schools would be offering the vaccine during the hours of the humanitarian pause, from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Palestinians gathering at a U.N. health care center in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, on Sunday.Credit…Ramadan Abed/Reuters

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

“The turnout for the first day of the campaign was positive and thousands of children and families were seen lining up ready to receive their vaccine,” it said in a statement.

Yet ******** strikes continued across the strip, including in central Gaza later in the day, according to the ************ Civil Defense, the emergency services agency. It said that at least 34 people had been ******* across Gaza as of Sunday evening, including 11 ******* in an ******** strike on a school building sheltering displaced people in Gaza City.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, have rushed more than 1.2 million doses of ***** polio vaccines to the region, and say that another 400,000 doses are on their way.

Dr. Majdi Dheir, the head of the campaign against polio in Gaza, said more than 2,700 people had been trained by experts from the health ministry, the W.H.O. and UNICEF to carry out the vaccinations.

Once the first round of vaccinations is complete, a booster round of immunizations will need to be administered four weeks later. ******* has agreed to repeat the staggered humanitarian pauses for the boosters as well.

The scale, ambition and logistics of the vaccination campaign are unprecedented in the Gaza war. The fact that the plan for it came together in only six weeks of negotiations after the virus was first detected is a sign of just how serious public health officials believe an outbreak could be.

Because polio can strike and spread rapidly, it is not only a risk to Gazans but also could spread to neighboring Egypt or *******, and potentially beyond. Whether the ******** can now be contained is impossible to determine, health experts have said.

******* has begun to

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booster vaccines for soldiers operating in Gaza.

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Polio is transmitted by contact with the ****** of an infected person, or consumption of water or food contaminated by fecal matter.

Aid and rights groups

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******** strikes have badly damaged access to sanitation and clean water in Gaza, not only risking the spread of preventable ********* but also possibly constituting a

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. In June, the aid organization Oxfam released a

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accusing ******* of destroying more than two-thirds of the enclave’s sewage pumps and all of its wastewater treatment plants.

A health worker marking the finger of a ************ child who had been vaccinated in Zawayda, central Gaza, on Sunday.Credit…Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

After the virus was detected in sewage samples from Gaza in July, the W.H.O. director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the conditions created “the perfect environment for ********* like polio to spread.”

Such warnings became more urgent when, two weeks ago, Gaza confirmed its first case of polio in 25 years, in a nearly 1-year-old boy.

Facing repeated displacement, tens of thousands of Gazans have crammed themselves into camps with little access to water and sanitation. As a result, some

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of solid waste have accumulated in or around populated areas, according to a U.N. assessment.

“My daughter already got that vaccine, so I was hesitant to take this step,” said Mohammed Abu Hashish, a 31-year-old Arabic teacher sheltering in a tent in Deir al Balah in central Gaza. But he said he decided to go forward with it on Sunday out of ***** for his 2-year-old daughter’s health and the risk of infection between her and her cousins.

Mamdouh Abu Nadi, who also took his 2-year-old daughter, Ikhlas, and his 10-year-old son, Kareem, to get vaccinated in Deir al Balah on Sunday, said that all of the children in the area where they are sheltering went to get the vaccine.

He added that he had also encouraged his extended family members to do the same “for the safety of all the children.”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

— Bilal ShbairErika Solomon and Hiba Yazbek Bilar Shbair reported from Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip.

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#Thousands #Protest #******* #Recovery #Hostages #******* #Gaza

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