UN polio campaign in Gaza reaches 189,000 children

The United Nations children's agency has said that a polio vaccination campaign to inoculate more than 640,000 children in Gaza is surpassing expectations at the end of the first phase of the programme.

- Peter Beaumont

Describing the campaign as a "rare bright spot" in almost 11 months of war, Unicef said that 189,000 children had been reached so far as more than 500 teams were deployed across central Gaza this week.

It said Israel and Hamas hadobserved limited pauses in the fighting to facilitate the campaign, with UN agencies involved now hoping to expand the campaign to the harderhit north and south of the territory.

The campaign was launched after Gaza had its first reported polio case in 25 years - a 10-month-old boy, now paralysed in the leg. Health experts have warned of disease outbreaks in the territory, where the vast majority of people have been displaced, often multiple times, and where hunger is widespread. Hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into squalid tent camps with few public services.

The vaccinations were being undertaken even as fighting continued in Gaza, with the territory's Hamas-controlled health ministry saying 42 people had been killed over the past 24 hours and 40,861 people since the war began.