Drive begins to give 600,000 Gaza children polio vaccine amid fighting

A complex, large-scale campaign to inoculate children against the newly emerged threat of polio in the Gaza Strip began yesterday despite fighting in the territory, according to UN officials and local health authorities.

- Bethan McKernan and Malak A Tantesh

Infectious conditions such as dysentery, pneumonia, and severe skin diseases are affecting more than 150,000 people in the Palestinian enclave, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, amid a dire humanitarian crisis and unsanitary conditions caused by Israel's campaign to annihilate Hamas in the wake of the 7 October attacks.

Aid workers have warned for months against possible outbreaks of potentially life-threatening and highly contagious diseases such as polio and cholera. Those fears were confirmed last month when the territory recorded its first case of type 2 polio since 1999 in a 10-monthold boy who had begun crawling but is now paralysed in one leg. The WHO estimates that hundreds more people are probably infected but not showing symptoms.

WHO officials say at least 90% of the 640,000 children in Gaza under 10 must be vaccinated with two drops of oral vaccine administered in two rounds four weeks apart to prevent the disease from spreading.