The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip said that Israel prohibits the entry of polio vaccination for 40 days, threatening 602 thousand children with a risk of permanent paralysis and chronic disability.
The ministry added in a statement on Tuesday that preventing the entry of vaccinations hinders the efforts to implement the fourth stage to enhance polio prevention.
In September 2024, the first campaign of polio vaccination was launched in Gaza, after announcing in August to record the first confirmed injury to the polio virus in the Strip of a 10 -month -old child.
The campaign ended in vaccinating more than 560,000 Palestinian children, according to the Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanum Guerbrisus.
In November 2024, the second phase ended with the vaccination of 556,774 children under the tenth of the sector. While the third campaign started last February and ended with the vaccination of about 600,000 Palestinian children under the age of ten.
According to the United Nations, Gaza children need two doses of vaccine, by mouth.
Polio is one of the diseases and infectious epidemics that appeared due to the Israeli genocide war on the Strip.
Gaza’s health indicated in the statement that the children of the Gaza Strip are threatened by dangerous and unprecedented health complications with the lack of proper nutrition sources and drinking water.
Last Wednesday, the government media office in the Gaza Strip warned of the risk of mass deaths at any moment, due to hunger, lack of health care and spread of diseases.
The office said that the sector is experiencing a real humanitarian catastrophe and a clearly defined starvation, in which hunger threatens the lives of the civilian population directly, led by more than a million and 100,000 children who suffer from severe malnutrition, due to the absence of food, water scarcity and the deterioration of the health system almost completely and the deprivation of people of the minimum elements of life.
On April 9th, UNRWA warned of the Gaza Strip approaching very severe hunger as a result of the continuous Israeli siege and the remainder of the remaining basic supplies to exile.
Israel has been besieging Gaza for 18 years, and about 1.5 million of its citizens, who numbered about 2.4 million Palestinians, have become homeless after the extermination war destroyed their homes, and the sector entered the stage of starvation, as a result of the closure of Tel Aviv crossings in the face of humanitarian aid.
Israel has committed absolute American support since October 7, 2023 genocide in Gaza, which left more than 168,000 dead and wounded by the Palestinians, most of them children and women, and more than 11 thousand missing.