In a medical center in the Al-Zawayda camp in the center of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Basma al-Batsh cannot hide her joy at the arrival of polio vaccines that will enable her children and thousands of other children to acquire immunity against the disease that has returned to the besieged and devastated sector. Dozens of parents with their children gathered outside the center waiting for the children to receive the vaccine from the medical staff distributed around the place. They had received text messages in the morning on their phones asking them to bring their children.
One child opens his mouth before a medical worker administers two drops of the vaccine orally. Al-Batsh says, “I feel joy and relief. I was afraid for my children from paralysis and diseases.” She adds, “But thank God, I am now happy because my children will get vaccinated.” The official vaccination campaign against polio in the Gaza Strip began on Sunday, according to a health official announced to Agence France-Presse.
The United Nations announced that the campaign would take place in stages across all areas of the Palestinian sector, which has been experiencing a devastating war for nearly eleven months, and will be accompanied by “humanitarian truces” whose terms have not been fully clarified. The United Nations announced the vaccination campaign after the first case of polio in a quarter-century was recorded last month in the Gaza Strip. A ten-month-old child in the center of the Gaza Strip contracted it. His family, who had been displaced repeatedly due to the war, said they had never been able to vaccinate him, like many other children in the sector.
A spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Louise Wateridge, confirmed that about two thousand children were vaccinated in a clinic in Deir al-Balah on Sunday.
She explained that there are mobile teams among the tents, and a mark with ink is placed on the thumb of the child who received the vaccination. The Ministry of Health in Gaza announced that it had vaccinated 72,611 children on the first day of the campaign. Polio virus often spreads through sewage and contaminated water, and is highly infectious. It can cause deformities and permanent paralysis, and can be fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.
The United Nations sent 1.26 million doses of oral vaccines. Ghadeer Haji said she felt fear when she heard about a recorded case of polio. She adds, “We felt fear for our children and demanded the necessity of providing vaccination for them.” According to Haji, “We received messages from the Ministry of Health and came here immediately.” The mother of five children said, “All of them received the vaccination.”
At the medical center in Al-Zawayda, boxes of vaccines stacked in one of the rooms were labeled with the name of the “UNICEF” organization. Outside, someone was distributing booklets titled “Questions and Answers about Polio,” while posters about the campaign were hung on the walls of the center. Some children received vaccines on Saturday, before the campaign officially began, in Khan Younis in the south of the sector.
