UN calls for urgent vaccination truce to protect Gaza's children

Two major UN agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, demanded on Friday seven-day "humanitarian pauses" in fighting in the Gaza Strip to vaccinate over 640,000 children under the age of 10 against polio in the coming weeks.

Both UN agencies "request all parties to the conflict to implement humanitarian pauses in the Gaza Strip for seven days to allow for two rounds of vaccination campaigns to take place," according to a release. The vaccination campaign will take place at the end of August and in September.

So far, no infections have been reported in the Palestinian semi-enclave, and no one has fallen ill. However, at the end of July, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that without "immediate action," the occurrence of infections "is just a matter of time."

In July, Israeli scientists reported in the daily newspaper "Haaretz" the discovery of the virus. They argued that to efficiently carry out the mass vaccination campaign, a truce in the Gaza Strip, where a war is raging between the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas and Israel, is urgently needed. They argued that polio outbreaks have repeatedly erupted during armed conflicts and crises, even in countries where the disease has been practically eliminated thanks to vaccines.

Currently, the most vulnerable to infection are children in both the Gaza Strip and Israel who have not yet been vaccinated.

Polio, also known as Heine-Medin disease or acute anterior poliomyelitis, is caused by a fecal-oral transmitted virus and can lead to paralysis, disability, or death. In the 1950s and 60s, mass vaccinations with new vaccines began in industrialized countries. However, vaccines were not implemented on a global scale until the 1970s.