A 10-month-old boy in the Gaza Strip was recently paralyzed by poliovirus – the first such case in the region this century. The sequences of the polioviruses detected in Gaza suggest that these viruses may be related to a strain circulating in Egypt, with the virus potentially being introduced to Gaza as early as September 2023.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.

During an August 19th meeting in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a “major push” to make arrangements for the safe implementation of a vaccination campaign in Gaza, where vaccinations and other health care have been severely disrupted since early October. Israel agreed to a temporary pause of some military operations to enable a polio vaccination campaign there. Israeli Prime Minister  Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that Israel had not agreed to “pauses in the fighting in order to administer polio vaccines,” but rather “the allocation of certain places in the Gaza Strip” for unstated purposes, an arrangement it said had been approved by the security cabinet.

The first phase of the vaccination campaign in the middle areas of Gaza started on September 1st. More than 500 teams deployed across central Gaza, administering the vaccine to children under 10. UN officials say they are making progress, having reached more than half of the children needing the oral drops in the first two stages of the campaign. UNICEF says the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza reached 189,000 children, surpassing its target. U.N. agencies now hope to expand the campaign to the harder-hit north and south of the territory. They hope to vaccinate a total of 640,000 children, 200,000 of them in the south. Follow-up vaccinations will take place in a month’s time.