For Israelis, Jittery Wait for Retaliatory Strikes Stretches Into a New Week

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For Israelis, Jittery Wait for Retaliatory Strikes Stretches Into a New Week

A street covered in stagnant wastewater last month in Deir al Balah in the Gaza Strip, near tents used as shelters by displaced Palestinians.Credit…Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

With polio probably already circulating in Gaza’s population, ******* Nations officials say, aid agencies are preparing to mount a

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with more than one million doses to prevent an outbreak there. About 18,000 doses are already on their way, Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency, said on Sunday.

But the effort faces steep odds: Getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza is already a slow and challenging process, and the decimation of the strip’s health care system over 10 months of war will make distribution *******. Polio vaccines must be refrigerated, further complicating matters; already, truckloads of food have gone bad in the summer heat as they have waited to be sent into Gaza and picked up for distribution.

The World Health Organization said last week that traces of poliovirus had been found in six wastewater samples from Gaza, raising fears of an outbreak not only in the territory, but also across the border in *******, given the frequent raids by ******** soldiers. A spokesman for the agency, ********** Lindmeier, said last week that the ************ Health Ministry in the West Bank was hoping to retest the samples to confirm the results.

If they are validated, some people in Gaza most likely already have the virus. About three-quarters of infected people do not show symptoms, so polio can spread even if no cases have been confirmed, Mr. Lindmeier said.

But getting anything into Gaza is difficult nowadays. Aid groups say that since the war began, ******** security restrictions on imports, attacks on aid convoys, damaged roads and the fighting and looting inside Gaza have kept them from distributing enough food, water, fuel, medical supplies, shelter equipment and materials for repairing sanitation and electricity systems. Even less aid has made it to where it needs to go since one of the main border crossings closed amid an ******** offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in early May.

“It’s not enough just to get it across the border,” Mr. Lindmeier said last week.

Without a halt to the fighting — or, at a minimum, roads cleared of rubble and conditions that would allow workers to administer the vaccines widely — the vaccine doses will sit at the crossing, stuck there just as other types of aid have been, he added.

From July 1 to July 29, according to U.N. data, an average of 77 truckloads of aid entered Gaza each day. From January to April, before the crossing closed, the daily average was 132 — which was not enough to keep thousands of Gazan children from descending into malnourishment, hospitals stocked with medicine and equipment, families in sturdy shelters or water and sewage systems up and running.

As the threat of famine and epidemics has hovered over Gaza for months, aid officials and health experts have said it is not enough to simply distribute canned food. They say people need a health care system capable of treating malnourishment and related *********; clean water and functioning sewage systems to prevent infectious ********* from spreading; and a diverse diet.

Hepatitis A, acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, lice and scabies are already surging through the population, health officials say.

******* says it is doing its part to facilitate the entry of aid. It says the ******* Nations’ numbers

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airdrops, other aid routes the organization does not monitor or trucks carrying commercial goods for *****, which have kept Gazan markets supplied with limited amounts of fresh fruit, vegetables and other foods. But many people cannot afford to buy food, or they have trouble finding cash to pay for goods.

The U.N. data also includes only trucks that it is able to pick up at the border and move into Gaza, rather than the total number of trucks that pass ******** inspection. Aid officials say organized ****** and looting in Gaza often makes it too unsafe for them to move the trucks from border crossings to their destinations, leaving many supplies stranded.

Under ******** requirements, the trucks ******* screens are half-full, but the inspected supplies are then reloaded onto new trucks on the Gaza side until they are full, meaning the number of trucks collected by the ******* Nations is far lower than the number that ******* says it has signed off on.

— Vivian Yee Reporting from Cairo

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