Gaza: Israel, Hamas agree to zoned three-day pauses in fighting to allow for polio vaccinations

The Israeli military and Palestinian militant group Hamas have agreed to three separate, zoned three-day pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip to allow for the vaccination of some 640,000 children against polio, a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Thursday.
The vaccination campaign is due to start on Sunday, September 1st, said Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO’s senior official for the Palestinian territories. He said the agreement was for the pauses to take place between 6am and 3pm local time.
He said the campaign would start in central Gaza with a three-day pause in fighting, then move to southern Gaza, where there would be another three-day pause, followed by northern Gaza. Mr Peeperkorn added that there was an agreement to extend the humanitarian pause in each zone to a fourth day if needed.
The WHO confirmed on August 23rd that at least one baby has been paralysed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years. The United Nations Security Council will meet later on Thursday on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit (COGAT) said on Wednesday that the vaccination campaign would be conducted in co-ordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses that will allow the population to reach the medical centres where the vaccinations will be administered”.
The WHO named the baby as Abdul-Rahman Abu Al-Jidyan. He will turn one-year-old on September 1st.
His mother Nivine Abu Al-Jidyan said she feared for her son after she was told by health officials they could do little to help him.
[ The plight of Gaza’s orphans: ‘My siblings have become my children’Opens in new window ]
[ Israeli companies banned from winning State defence contracts – TánaisteOpens in new window ]
“I was shocked that my son got this disease amid the war and the closure of border crossings, under these conditions and lack of medicine for him, it’s a shock. Would he remain like this?” Abu Al-Jidyan told Reuters on Thursday.
“He is my only baby boy. It’s his right to travel and be treated; it’s his right to walk, run and move like before … It is unfair that he stays thrown in the tent without care or attention,” she said from a tent in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
At Nasser Hospital, in the southern city of Khan Younis, Umm Eliane Bakr fears her 19-month-old daughter may be vulnerable to polio due to ill health brought on by malnutrition.
She hopes her baby will be vaccinated soon, but said she is worried about moving safely in an area where there have been repeated Israeli strikes.
“I cannot walk in the street and get bombed, or have something happen to my daughter, or have a targeted [attack]. I need a truce, a ceasefire so I can give my daughter this [vaccine],” she told Reuters.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu this week denied media reports Israel was preparing for a generalised humanitarian truce, saying that a more limited plan had been presented.
Senior Hamas official Izzat El-Reshiq reiterated the group’s support for the UN and international organisations’ initiative for an urgent humanitarian truce across the enclave to allow the polio vaccination campaign.
On Thursday, Israeli forces continued to bombard areas across the Gaza Strip in their battle against Hamas-led militants. Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes have so far killed at least 34 people.
One strike on a house in Gaza City killed eight Palestinians, including children, they said, while three others were killed when an Israeli missile hit a motorcycle in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
A neighbour of the bombed Gaza City house said they had managed to lower a ladder into the building to rescue a family trapped inside, but had only managed to extract one young girl.
“After that, the fire consumed them and we could not reach them,” he said.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on October 7th when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the enclave has killed over 40,600 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
Elsewhere, the Israeli military said on Thursday its troops killed five Palestinian militants who were hiding inside a mosque in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, in one of its largest assaults in the Israeli-occupied territory for months.
The operation, which a Reuters witness said has yet to conclude, began in the early hours of Wednesday with hundreds of Israeli troops backed by helicopters, drones and armoured personnel carriers raiding the flashpoint cities of Tulkarm, Jenin and areas in the Jordan Valley.
There was also a complete network outage at Jawwal, one of the two main telecommunications companies in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, according to the Reuters witness.
Palestinian health authorities said at least 12 Palestinians were killed in Wednesday’s operations.
Clashes with Israeli forces in the West Bank have escalated since Israel’s war with Hamas militants began in Gaza nearly 11 months ago.
More than 660 – combatants and civilians – have been killed, by Palestinian tallies, some by Jewish settlers who have carried out frequent vigilante-style attacks on West Bank Palestinian communities.
Israel says Iran provides weapons and support to militant factions in the West Bank and the military has, as a result, cranked up its operations there.
Referring to the latest operation, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz said in a post on X overnight: “This is a war in every sense, and we must win it.”
Amnesty said it is likely the intensified scale of Israel’s West Bank operation would result in an increase in forced displacement, destruction of critical infrastructure and measures of “collective punishment”, which have been key pillars of what it called Israel’s “system of apartheid”.
Israel denies having any practice of collective punishment or apartheid in the West Bank, saying it seeks only to defeat armed Palestinian militants threatening its security. – Reuters